m 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, j 

Chap. 3 , __,_L____ 

Shelf __-_jy\_£-_- | 

. . _ f 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. c f 



Lectures on the Church, 



DELIVERED IN 



St. Francis Xavier's Church, 



New York, 1870-71. 



By Rev. D. A. Merrick, S.J. 




NEW YORK! 

P. O'SHEA, 27 BARCLAY STREET, 

1872. 






2+v* 



INTRODUCTION. 

The following Lectures cannot lay claim to 
any great originality. They have been has- 
tily written out from notes collected irregu- 
larly at different intervals of time. The trans- 
lations of extracts from the Fathers have been 
principally taken from approved works, such 
as the " Faith of Catholics," Allies' " See of 
Peter," etc. ; and most of the other arguments 
employed may be found scattered through 
different books of controversy. The object 
aimed at in the Lectures has been to connect 
these arguments in such a form as might add 
to the force of the impression they are by 
themselves calculated to produce, in particu- 
lar by the brief and simple explanation of cer- 
tain incidental points of Catholic doctrine. St. 
Augustin's principle, that it is good to multi- 
ply good books on the same subject, in order 



iv Introduction. 

that the same truth may have a chance of be- 
ing presented to a greater number of readers 
and in a manner to suit every variety of 
minds and tastes, is the only excuse for offer- 
ing to the public another work on a contro- 
versy which many men are beginning to con- 
sider in our days, not only as exhausted, but 
as obsolete. 



CONTENTS. 



Introduction 3 

Lecture I. — The Bible 7 

Lecture II. — The Bible 42 

Lecture III. — The Church 87 

Lecture IV. — The Church 131 

Lecture V. — The Pope 174 

Lecture VI. — The Pope 217 



LECTURE I. 
The Bible. 

All Christians agree in the belief that, 
since the day when the twelve Apostles first 
preached to the astonished Jews in the streets 
of Jerusalem, there is but one true, revealed 
religion, obligatory on all mankind, that of 
Jesus Christ — the one to-day believed in, and 
practised by, His Church. That worship, ex- 
terior as well as interior, is due to God, as the 
natural expression of man, His creature's de- 
pendence on Him, is a truth evident to reason 
and flowing from the fact of God's existence 
and the nature of man's physical and social 
being. That it is in God's power, moreover, 
to reveal a particular mode of worship, which 
He wishes to be adopted by all men to the 
exclusion of every other, I suppose, in com- 
mencing these lectures, to be admitted by my 



8 The Bible. 

hearers as equally evident to reason. I shall 
further suppose the facts narrated by the 
Evangelists of the life and teachings of Jesus 
Christ, to be admitted also as historically true, 
as well as the certainty of Christ's mission to 
teach men the right way in which to serve 
God. There are, no doubt, in these days, 
many men — and the number is unfortunately 
increasing — who permit themselves to doubt 
all these truths, and even the existence of a 
Creator, and these men found their doubts on 
the discoveries of modern science. But so 
did the skeptics of the sixteenth century found 
their doubts on the discoveries of science, till 
further discoveries furnished a solution to all 
their difficulties. Even the foremost men in 
the ranks of unbelieving science admit that they 
have only reasons for doubt, and their own 
declarations as to the great caution with which 
conclusions are to be drawn from scientific 
data, show how weak indeed are the argu- 
ments by which they would impair credence 
in truths which otherwise stand on a basis 



The Bible. 9 

of the most clearly demonstrated certitude. 
Granted the existence of an intelligent, per- 
sonal God, that He directs by His constant 
providence a world which is the effect of His 
own creation, is a necessary consequence. 
That He may also, by the gift of prophecy, 
make known to certain of His creatures those 
future events which are always present to His 
own Eternity, and that, by miracle, He may 
suspend those physical laws, the operation of 
which is not essential to the existence of 
matter, are conclusions also which commend 
. themselves as obviously logical to the human 
mind. Whether He actually did reveal pro- 
phecies which were fulfilled in the person 
of Jesus Christ, and whether His miraculous 
intervention is manifest in the works per- 
formed by Jesus Christ, is simply an historical 
question, to be resolved by the laws of histor- 
ical investigation. That such prophecies ex- 
isted, that these miracles were wrought, and 
that, taken in connection with the eminent 
sanctity of the doctrine taught by Him, they 



io The Bible. 

prove Jesus Christ to have been the messen- 
ger of God, is the belief of all those who wish 
to -be called Christians. The only question 
with them is, which of the different forms of 
existing Christian worship has most claims 
upon their respect, and whether any one of 
these can prove itself to have been the sole 
form established by Christ, with the obligation 
of being accepted and followed by all those 
who embraced His doctrine. It is to such 
persons only that I address myself, for it is 
with such persons only that my arguments 
will have any weight. 

That which first strikes the mind of one 
who contemplates the whole Christian world, 
is the fact of its being divided into two great 
sections. One of these sections, which is 
compact, united, truly Catholic, in this sense, 
that wherever it exists its doctrine is alto- 
gether the same, maintains : that it alone is 
the true Church of Jesus Christ ; that the 
other section, composed of innumerable sub- 
divisions, is not at all the Church of Christ, 



The Bible. 1 1 

but is made up only of dead branches cut off 
from it, their parent trunk ; that outside of it, 
and in them (except in the case of invincible 
ignorance, when the soul in reality belongs 
to the true Church without knowing where 
that Church is) there is no salvation ; that it 
alone can determine what is of Christian faith 
and what is not, and that to its decisions im- 
plicit submission is due ; that to every sin- 
cere inquirer its divine origin can be proved, 
and that consequently all are obliged to enter 
its communion. This section is called the 
Roman Catholic Church. All those compos- 
ing the other section, whether Greeks or 
Nestorians or Protestants, agree in asserting 
that it is not necessary for salvation to belong 
to any one branch of the Church of Christ, 
since no one of them alone can claim infalli- 
bility ; and, while accusing the Roman Church 
of erroneous doctrines, they admit that all 
those in its communion may be saved : this 
the Protestants explain more distinctly, by 
declaring that what is necessary to be be- 



1 2 The Bible. 

lieved are the fundamental or essential points 
of the Christian revelation, and that these 
points are clearly expressed in Scripture and 
are professed by all orthodox Christian be- 
lievers. 

Here are two systems of teaching diametri- 
cally opposed to each other, not only as con- 
traries, but even as contradictories. If I said 
of an object that it was white, and another 
person said it was black, we might both be 
mistaken ; for it might be brown. But here 
what one portion of the Christian Church af- 
firms, the other denies ; what one denies, the 
other affirms. The one says, I alone am the 
Church of Christ ; the other says, You are not 
alone the Church of Christ. The first repeats, 
I alone have kept the pure doctrine of Christ, 
and all my doctrine is His teaching; the other 
replies, You have not alone kept the pure doc- 
trine Christ, and all your doctrine is not His 
teaching. The first continues, All souls are 
mine, and out of me there is no salvation ; the 
second answers, Your pretensions are unwar- 



The Bible. 13 

rantable, in order to be saved, there is no 
obligation for any Christian to enter your 
communion. Can both -these assertions be 
true? Evidently not. Can God have autho- 
rized both ? Assuredly not, since only one 
of them can be true, and God can only ap- 
prove of that which is the truth. Can God 
be unconcerned as to which side we embrace 
in this dispute. Without speaking of the 
minor discrepancies existing among all those 
outside of the Roman Catholic Church, and 
supposing for the moment, that God may be 
indifferent as to these minor discrepancies 
even in the matter of religious truth — is it 
possible that He can view with indifference 
this state of contradiction, this violent antagon- 
ism, this scandal of the disruption of Christian- 
ity and of Christendom ? Can He who hates 
falsehood, who hates a lie, because He is Him- 
self infinite Sanctity and Truth ; who hates er- 
ror, who hates every divergence from the truth, 
because, no matter how slight that divergence 
may be in the origin, if logically carried out, 



14 The Bible. 

it will lead to the greatest extremes of error 
and untruth; can He, after having sent an 
envoy upon earth to publish a religion which 
he was to seal with his own life's blood, and 
which it was to be binding on all the children 
of men to receive and conform themselves to, 
under pain of the eternal displeasure of their 
Maker ; can He now be careless as to whether 
that religion is taught as He wished it to be 
believed, and practiced as He wished it to be 
practiced? All this is impossible. Hence 
arises another question : What is the duty of 
man in view of this antagonism ? Here is the 
Roman Catholic Church which maintains that 
she alone represents truly the religion of 
Christ, and that all persons are bound to join 
her fold under penalty of the extreme sanc- 
tion of God's eternal justice. It is true all the 
Protestant, with the schismatical sects, deny 
this assumption. But in presence of this . 
affirmation and of this denial, what is the duty 
in conscience of every man who has not yet 
firmly grasped in his mind the conviction of 



The Bible. 1 5 

the perfect truth of the one and the falsity of 
the other ? Can he remain in a state of 
doubt ? And if he does not believe that God 
is pleased that he should remain in a state of 
doubt, what obligation is imposed upon him ? 
That of inquiry, assuredly ; that of examining 
the grounds on which this affirmation and 
this denial are based, in order to know which 
is founded on the solid rock, and which is 
built upon the moving sand. If this investi- 
gation be accompanied by prayer to God in 
order that He may strengthen the feeble light 
of human reason, and conducted with true 
sincerity of heart, there can be no fear that it 
will not lead to a satisfactory conclusion. For 
God would not be God, He would deny His 
own infinite Justice and Wisdom, if He refus- 
ed to furnish His creature with the necessary 
means for acquiring the certain knowledge of 
that truth in which He obliges him to believe, 
and to the investigation of the existence of 
which He obliges him, when doubting, to de- 
vote the energies of his heart and intellect. 



1 6 The Bible. 

" If," says St. Augustin, " God's providence 
does not watch over human affairs, then we 
have nothing to do with religion. But if the 
voice of nature itself and our conscience bid 
us seek God and serve Him, then we must 
not doubt that God Himself has appointed an 
authoritative means, by clinging to which we 
are certain finally to reach Him." — (De Util. 
Credendi xvi., 34.) " A path and away there 
shall be," says the Prophet Isaias, " and it 
shall be called the holy way : the unclean 
shall not pass over it ; and this shall be for 
you a straight way, so that fools shall not en- 
ter therein ?" — (xxxv., 8.) Which is this so 
straight way that fools cannot enter therein ? 
this way so clear for the clean-hearted to 
God ? this authoritative means by clinging to 
which we are to reach God ? No doubt it will 
reveal itself to an honest research. The object 
of these lectures is to facilitate that research : 
and the affirmation of this eminent Father 
and the promise of the prophet, are cheerful 



The Bible. 1 7 

and encouraging forebodings of the success of 
our undertaking. 

Two ways of examining the merits of the 
controversy between Protestants and Catho- 
lics will present themselves to the mind of an 
inquirer. The one, at first sight the more ex- 
haustive, will be to consider in detail all the 
points of doctrine on which the two religions 
are at variance. But a little reflection will 
suffice to satisfy the intelligence that the other 
method is both more radical and more satis- 
factory. This is to consider, since the Roman 
Catholic Church claims an authority which the 
Protestant churches deny to it, what are the 
arguments by which she endeavors to sub- 
stantiate her claim on the one hand, and, on 
the other hand, for what reason or reasons do 
they refuse to admit this her claim. Herein 
lies the fundamental difference between the 
two opponents. A Christian must believe. 
On what authority must he believe ? The 
Catholic answers : On the authority of the 



1 8 The Bible. 

Church. To this the Protestant says : No. 
Thus is started the controversy on the Chris- 
tian rule of faith. Now in this dispute I must 
premise, and it will be admitted, that the Ca- 
tholic Church has a presumption in her favor. 
She is on the defensive. She has the right 
of possession. She was for fifteen hundred 
years before Protestantism came into exist- 
ence. It is therefore the business of the sects, 
who are here the besieging party, to bring 
forward guns of such heavy calibre as will 
certainly break down her walls. If their own 
position is untenable, if their batteries will not 
stand fire, it is clear that she will remain un- 
injured. Let us then consider to-night what 
it is they substitute instead of the authority 
of the Church as the ground on which the 
Christian has to found his belief. Afterwards 
we shall review the arguments by which the 
right of the Church to the power which she 
claims appears to be justified. 

The Protestant rule of faith, to express it 
in the tersest manner, is — the Bible. Catho- 



The Bible. 1 9 

Kcs admit the authority of the Bible, but — 
as interpreted by the Church ; nor do they 
concede that all which is to be believed as of 
faith is contained in the books which com- 
pose that sacred volume. According to the 
Protestant theory, the Bible needs no com- 
mon interpreter ; every right-minded individ- 
ual will find therein clearly enough expressed 
all that it is necessary for him to believe. 
Now let us proceed to see whether this theo- 
ry can stand. 

The first thing to be established with re- 
gard to a rule of faith, is, its authority. Let 
a lawyer appeal before a judge to a certain 
law, which, on being challenged, he cannot 
prove to have ever been the law, and what 
will be thought of him? How, then, do 
Protestants establish the authority of the 
Bible alone as their rule of faith ? Either 
from the Bible itself, or otherwise. Not oth- 
erwise, since their final appeal is to the Bible. 
Is it from the Bible itself? This would be a 
begging of the question ; for the question is, 



20 The Bible. 

Is the Bible our final court of appeal ? Here 
is a dilemma, out of which it is impossible to 
escape, except by saying that the Bible asserts 
its own authority, at the same time presenting 
such intrinsic marks of credibility as force the 
mind to submit to its testimony. Whether the 
Bible bears such unmistakable features as ne- 
cessitate the belief in its divine character, we 
shall consider in another place. Meanwhile, for 
the moment, let us admit that the sacred vol- 
ume can testify in its own behalf: is there one 
passage in holy Writ which shows the Bible 
to be the only rule of faith ? I answer : not 
one. Protestant divines, indeed, have alleged 
many passages, disagreeing among them- 
selves as to which really proved in their favor 
and which did not. But I can safely assert 
that there is not one passage in all Scripture 
which has the least weight on their side in 
this controversy. As an illustration : we may 
suppose that, in his controversy with Arch- 
bishop Hughes, Mr. Breckenridge, when call- 
ed upon, must have produced at first those 



The Bible, 2 1 

texts of Scripture which appeared to him 
most convincingly in favor of t his side of the 
question. He gives two : they are his Ajax 
and his Achilles. The first is from Isaias viii. 
20 : " " To the law rather and to the testimo- 
ny." Now this passage, taken in connection 
with its context, is simply a warning given by 
the prophet to the Jews against believing in 
fortune-tellers — in those diviners who, like the 
witch of Endor and our modern professors of 
spirit-rapping, pretended to evoke the dead 
for the purpose of giving information to the 
living ; and the attempt to make more out 
of it is only a violent effort of the imagina- 
tion. So St. Peter tells us that "we have 
the more firm prophetical word ; whereunto 
you do well to attend ;" and he says imme- 
diately afterward, that " no prophecy is made 
t>y private interpretation " (2 Pet. i. 19). His 
second text is from 2 Tim. iii. 16: "All 
Scripture inspired from God is profitable/' 
etc. No one proclaims this more loudly than 
the whole Catholic Church. That the Scrip- 



22 



The Bible. 



ture is inspired, that it is useful " to teach, to 
reprove, to correct, to instruct," we most 
firmly believe ; — and therefore we hold that 
it should be read especially by bishops, such 
as St. Timothy to whom St. Paul is writing 
was, whose duty precisely is, to teach, to in- 
struct, to correct, to reprove. There is noth- 
ing in this text to signify that the Scripture as 
understood by the private reader, is the only 
rule of faith. Quite the contrary ; in the 
verse immediately preceding the commence- 
ment of the text quoted, St. Paul warns Tim- 
othy to " continue" in the things he had 
" learned," and which had been committed to 
"him," knowing of whom " he had learned 
them," thus evidently alluding to tradition, 
another means for acquiring the knowledge 
of the truth, altogether distinct from the read- 
ing of the Scripture. I might add, that the 
Scriptures here referred to, being such as 
Timothy had known " from his infancy," 
could be necessarily only those of the Old 
Testament ; consequently this text has no 



The Bible. 23 

reference to that portion of the Bible, the 
New Testament, which is the principal part 
for Christians. If I were to repeat all the 
texts which have been brought forward by 
the same side in this dispute, you would find 
that they are all equally irrelevant to the 
point at issue. 

The prophet has told us that the way to 
God will be so straight that not even fools 
can go astray therein. Is the Protestant 
rule of faith such a road ? It is not. For, 
first : The Bible is a dead letter. No dead 
letter can explain itself. " The letter kills, 
the spirit vivifies." What is it that reveals 
that spirit of the law ? A living interpreter. 
Every written law requires a living inter- 
preter. That living interpreter existed for 
the Old Law — which Protestants to-day un- 
dertake to interpret privately, as well as the 
New — in the Jewish Sanhedrim. "Thou, 
shalt do whatever the priests of the Levitical 
race shall teach thee, according to what I 
have commanded them," says the book of 



24 The Bible. 

Deuteronomy, xxiv. 8. " Ask the priests the 
law," says the prophet Aggaeus, ii. 12. "The 
lips of the priest shall keep knowledge," says 
the prophet Malachi, " and they shall seek the 
law at his mouth." So it is in all civil societies : 
for this reason we have courts of law, and 
judges and lawyers and precedents. In Eng- 
land and America, besides the Statute, we 
have the Common Law (so much boasted of), 
which is a tradition. And, in these courts, 
old judges who have the law at their fingers* 
ends, will listen attentively to young advo- 
cates, through the desire, if not the expecta- 
tion, of hearing something which will increase 
their intelligence of the spirit of the law. 
" The existence is necessary," says Bayle, an 
inpartial authority, since he was neither a 
Protestant nor a Catholic, but an infidel phi- 
losopher, " in every society of a tribunal 
whose decision is final in the differences of 
private individuals, and which can inflict pun- 
ishment on those who refuse it obedience : 
otherwise there is no remedy in cases of 



The Bible. 2 5 

trouble, and controversies would be eternal." 
Therefore in the Christian society such a 
tribunal must exist ; could Christ, the wisest 
of legislators, have appointed as arbiter of 
religious controversies a dead letter? 

Secondly, the Bible is obscure. This is a 
fact. It is idle to say that God cannot write 
obscurely. He would not have done so, had 
He intended the Bible to be self-interpreting. 
The fact that He has done so proves that He 
has appointed an authority to expound its 
meaning. The very first words of the volume 
may be taken in different significations, as 
the same words when used by St. John in the 
commencement of his Gospel. St. Paul is a 
writer whose style is not alw r ays so clear as it 
is sublime : the English philosopher Locke 
(who is considered a man of brains) deckired 
that he could not understand St. Paul. And 
who can pretend to understand the prophecies, 
or the book of the Apocalypse or Revela- 
tions ? Open the sacred volume at random, 
probably the first paragraph your eyes will 



26 The Bible. 

fall on will be a mystery to your intelligence. 
Consequently, thirdly, the Bible privately 
interpreted, is a source of contradictions. 
Protestants say, either that the Scripture is 
clear of itself to reason alone, or that the 
Spirit, that is, God the Holy Ghost, will en- 
lighten the individual reader as to its mean- 
ing. What has been the practical result, after 
three hundred year's experience of the work- 
ing of their system, whether explained by in- 
dividual reason or by the private spirit ? 
Confusion : the temple of Protestantism is a 
tower of Babel. The result has been that, 
outside of the Catholic Church, you will find 
every one of the tenets held by Roman Ca- 
tholics denied separately by different sects, 
and every one of them (and they are nume- 
rous) separately affirmed. This may be said 
in particular of persons living in the Anglican 
communion alone, which, on account of its 
" comprehensiveness," to use an expression 
adopted by its own dignitaries, seems to re- 
sume all Protestantism as* in a compendium ; 



The Bible. 2 J 

the " highest " of its members admit even the 
supremacy of the Pope, its " broadest " mem- 
bers can with difficulty be distinguished from 
rank infidels. Yet we cannot ascribe this in- 
finite variety of belief among Protestants to 
insincerity : so sweeping an accusation against 
millions of Christians would be extravagant. 
The defect then is in their rule of faith. 

Fourthly, this rule is destructive of Christ's 
whole plan of His Church. (1.) Christ pro- 
mised unity to His Church : he prayed to His 
Father that it should be " one, as We are 
one." What is these " one " among the Pro- 
testant sects ? Nothing but their hostility to 
the Catholic Church. On every other point 
they disagree : they as little deserve to be 
called united as did these States when the 
South was battling against the North ; if Pro- 
testantism be an empire, it is an empire in a 
state of constitutional civil war. (2.) Christ 
committed authority to His Church. He left 
the commandment " to hear the Church," and 
he who did. not do so, should be treated " as 



28 The Bible. 

the heathen and the publican/' Therefore 
the Church is called by the Apostle " the 
pillar and the ground of- truth." Now in the 
Protestant system, this commandment is im- 
possible to be fulfilled ; there can be no obli- 
gations to " hear " a Church " as the pillar 
and ground of truth," wherein every one has 
the right to interpret for himself, and wherein 
there are as many divergences of opinion as 
there are varieties of minds and dispositions. 
(3.) Christ ordered His disciples to go and 
preach the Gospel. " Go ye into the whole 
world and preach the Gospel to every crea- 
ture. " All power is given unto me in hea- 
ven and on earth ; go ye therefore and teach 
all nations!' " He that" hears and " believes 
shall be saved : he that believes not shall be 
condemned." " Behold I am with you all 
ages even till the end of time." " He that 
heareth you heareth me, and he that despiseth 
you despiseth me, and despiseth Him that 
me." Whence the Apostle concludes, " Faith 
then cometh by hearing." " And they went 



The Bible. 29 

and preached everywhere," and " their sound 
hath gone forth unto all the earth, and their 
words unto the ends of the whole world." 
" And God hath indeed set some in the 
Church, first apostles, secondly prophets, 
thirdly teachers. — Are all Apostles ? are all 
prophets ? are all teachers ?" (Cor. xii. 29.) 
" He that knoweth God," says the Apostle 
St. John, u heareth us : he that is not of God, 
heareth us not : by this we know the spirit 
of truth and the spirit of error." (1 Jn. iv. 6.) 
And St. Paul writes to his disciple Timothy 
to transmit to others this power of instructing : 
" the things which thou hast heard of me by 
many witnesses, the same commend to faith- 
ful men, who shall be fit to teach others also." 
(2 Tim. ii. 2.) Now, may I ask, what right 
have Protestant ministers, I will not say to 
preach, but to teach ? to preach so as to 
teach ? as the Apostles did and their succes- 
sors ? Where every one has the right to in- 
terpret for himself, no one is bound to be 
taught by another. (4.) Christ communicated 



30 The Bible. 

indefectible infallibility to His Church. This 
communication is distinctly signified in the 
order of its founders and their successors, to 
go and " preach," and the accompanying pro- 
mise that He would be with them all days 
even to the consummation of the world. For 
Christ did not send his disciples to preach 
anything but the truth, and the sense of this 
promise of His presence is perpetual im- 
munity from error. So it should be ; for God 
must have appointed for Christians some 
means of knowing certainly the truth. This 
means is an infallible guide : none other can 
give us certitude, which is necessary for im- 
plicit belief. My reason is an infallible guide 
in the things which it perceives : thus I know 
infallibly that two and two can never make 
more or less than four. The Spirit of God is 
an infallible guide when it really does speak 
to me. But what is infallible in the Protest- 
ant system ? The Bible ? Yes, but the 
Bible is a dead letter, which cannot explain 
itself when understood in different ways, and 



The Bible. 31 

the fact is that, whether interpreted by pri- 
vate reason or by the private spirit, it has 
been made to bear ten thousand contradictory 
meanings. v Of what use is a guide to me 
who will not brinor me out of the words ? 

Fifthly, this rule is opposed (1.) to Christ's 
love of order. For it destroys authority in 
religion ; and Christ, who came to teach, 
" not as the Scribes and Pharisees, but as 
one having authority," the God of order and 
subordination, who exacts submission to au- 
thority in every human society established by 
Him as the author of nature, in the family, in 
civil society, could not assuredly have aban- 
doned the order of divine worship which He 
founded to the capricious interpretation of 
every private individual judgment. God has 
given free-will and liberty to all men, but in- 
dependence He has granted to no one, and 
in no order of things ; the stars, the tides, the 
very winds of heaven obey fixed laws ; 
throughout the whole animal, vegetable, and 
mineral creation is to be found law, order, 



32 The Bible. 

subjection, and dependence : it is contrary to 
every sense of what is right and consistent to 
suppose that in the awful question of religious 
duty man should be abandoned to his own 
recklessness, as though this question were a 
matter not worthy of the providential care of 
his Creator. (2.) It is opposed, consequently,, 
to Christ's wisdom and consistency. (3.) It 
is opposed to his foresight. The whole Bible 
was not written till near the year 100 after 
Christ, its different parts were not collected 
together till the year 300, nor translated till 
400, nor universally accepted in the Church, 
as they now stand, till about the year 5oo. 
What did the whole Christian world do until 
then in order to know the truth ? And if the 
Christian religion is to be learned only by the 
reading of the Bible, and to be spread conse- 
quently by the distribution of Bibles, how did 
Christian missionaries do up to the year 
1440, when printing was invented? They 
propagated the faith ; they converted nations, 
all Europe, a great part of Asia and of Africa. 



The Bible. 33 

And since that time ? Not one people has 
been converted by the Bible. The eternal 
sterility of "Protestant missions, so often 
thrown in the face of the Bible Societies by 
travellers of their own creed, is a standing 
reproach. The Church of England sends out 
German Lutherans and Calvinists, who, as it 
believes, have no mission, to scatter Bibles 
broadcast and deliver up the sacred volume 
to the pagan and scoffer, or rather invite 
them to destroy it and abuse it in every vile 
and profane manner, they worse than waste 
millions of money without often the profit of 
a single soul ; while the poor Roman Ca- 
tholic missionary, by his teaching, example, 
and labor, converts the heathen population 
everywhere by thousands and tens of thous- 
ands, laying down his life, if necessary, that 
they may have the courage to make the 
sacrifice of theirs ; and the history of the 
Churches of Japan, of China, and of farther 
India, during the last generation, shows too 
abundantly how the Catholic Christians of 



34 The Bible. 

those distant lands — and only they — have 
been able to support the rattan, the fire, and 
the executioner's axe, sooner than renounce 
their faith in Jesus Christ. 

And since the beginning of Christianity 
down to the present time, how has it been 
with all those numerous classes, those who 
cannot read, little children, those who have 
defective intelligence, the very dull of mind, 
who nevertheless have been called and are 
obliged to be Christians, those who have 
not sufficient time, the great mass of mankind, 
those who have never seen a Bible, and they 
are many — how were they to be saved ? By 
believing what it teaches, on the word of some 
one who will explain it to them, if they should 
be fortunate enough to find such a one ? But 
this simply proves that the rule is an imprac- 
ticable one ; for, besides the fact that these 
persons do not read the Bible for themselves, 
the Episcopalian and the Presbyterian, the 
Unitarian and the Trinitarian, the Sacramen^ 
tarian and the Evangelical, the High-Church^ 



The Bible. 35 

man and the Low-Churchman, the Broad- 
Churchman and the Narrow-Churchman, will 
explain it to "them in different and opposite 
ways. How then has the overwhelming ma- 
jority of human-kind been able to work this 
rule ? 

Sixthly, this rule destroys not only unity of 
belief, but constancy. Every Protestant sect 
has always been changing. This was proved 
by Bossuet, in his History of the Variations, 
200 years ago ; a much more voluminous 
work on the subject could be written now. 
Luther changed his opinions many times ; so 
did Wesley. Change is the essejtce of Protest- 
autism. For the principle of Protestantism is 
inquiry : it never pretends to possess the 
truth : it admits that it may always be wrong ; 
therefore Protestants are obliged always to be 
ready to change ; therefore if the contrary of 
what they believed yesterday appear to them 
true to-day, they are obliged honestly to think 
so — and if to-morrow they should discover 
that what they to-day judge to be true is 



36 The Bible. 

false, they are obliged to think so too — there- 
fore they may be obliged in conscience to 
abandon the certain truth (since what they 
believed yesterday may have been the truth) 
for that which certainly is false (since what 
they sincerely believe to-day, they may dis- 
cover to-morrow not to be the truth). There- 
fore it is all mere opinion, without any certi- 
tude whatever. 

Therefore, seventhly, this rule destroys all 
faith. A Protestant cannot make an act of 
faith. How can he? since he is never sure 
of what he believes, and, as I hope to be able 
to show in the course of these lectures, as a 
Protestant, he is not even certain of the Bible 
on which he grounds his belief. Eighthly, it 
renders impossible any criterion of faith. For 
it resolves itself, after all, into mere individual 
opinion ; so that there is no final arbiter of 
controversies, but every one has the right, 
and ought, to decide for himself, according to 
his own private judgment, even though it be 



The Bible. 37 

contrary to that which has always been the 
belief of all the rest of mankind. To prove 
that this is not an exaggeration, but a princi- 
ple, of which Protestantism has furnished, in 
its history, the practical application, let me 
state one fact. Until the time of Calvin, no 
one, except one man, Berengarius, who re- 
tracted his opinion, had ever doubted that 
these words, "This is my body," meant what 
they literally signified : " This is my body." 
In twenty-five years from the commencement 
of the Reformation, two hundred interpreta- 
tions had been found for these four words, 
" This is my body," all different from one 
another, bu.t all meaning: "This is not my 
body." Ninthly, it destroys the very object 
of a church ; since every man can be a church 
for himself. What need is there of an organ- 
ization, what need of teachers or of temples, 
if every man can, nay, is bound, to inter- 
pret for himself, to teach himself? It destroys 
the very hope or possibility of a church : you 



38 The Bible. 

might as well endeavor to make all men of 
one mind in politics, as hope to see them 
come to agree in religion, if the matter is left 
to their own private reasoning. 

Tenthly, this rule destroys the sanctity of 
the Christian religion, as inculcated by Jesus 
Christ, by pandering to the pride, self-will, 
presumption, and pertinacity of man. All the 
life and teachings of Jesus Christ were a les- 
son of humility, submission and self-denial : 
this rule is adapted to flatter the conceit of 
every old doating woman, crazy girl, and silly 
young man, who chooses to rave on religion, 
4 'speaking swelling words of vanity, fountains 
without water, and clouds tossed with whirl- 
wind," (2 Pet. ii. 17.) And, eleventhly and 
finally, it destroys the very essential character 
of religion, which, by its own nature, and from 
the nature of man, and the exigencies of his 
nature is traditional, taught by the father to 
his son, and so handed down from generation 
to generation. Thus religion was preserved 



The Bible. 39 

before the patriarchs ; so it was preserved 
among the Jewish people, and during their 
captivity ; so it must have been propagated 
in the early period of Christianity, as we have 
seen ; and so it was maintained throughout 
Christendom during the so-called ages of cor- 
ruption, till the Reformation. And the chil- 
dren of the Reformation ? So do they hand 
it down traditionally, teaching it to their chil- 
dren as they were taught themselves, because 
they cannot practically refuse to obey an in- 
stinct, which their reason and good sense, 
more powerful than their theoretical rule, tell 
them is the voice of duty. They are practi- 
cally illogical, because their rule is practically 
absurd. And fortunately they do not leave it 
wholly to the child to determine from the 
Bible what shall be his belief and religious 
practice ; the Bible would remain unstudied. 
Better it were never opened, than to be open- 
ed, as it is, by prurient boys and girls to find 
food therein with which to satisfy the cravings 



40 The Bible. 

of a premature appetite and indulge the mor- 
bid curiosity of a petulant imagination. 

This will suffice for to-night. If, in urging 
any argument, any of my expressions may 
have appeared to be severe, I beg you to 
think that I wish only to give my reasoning 
its full force, not to offend the sympathies of 
those whom I believe to be in error, but 
whom I also believe to have embraced this 
error only in the sincere apprehension that it 
was the truth. 

It may be asked, How does the Church es- 
tablish her authority? since she is the final 
arbiter to whom Catholics are allowed to ap- 
peal. I answer : the Church, first, asserts her 
right to be heard and obeyed ; she presents 
herself among men as the ambassador of God, 
and — offers her credentials. These creden- 
tials are what we call her marks of credibility, 
and, if we find them to be perfectly in order, 
we are bound to recognize her as that which 



The Bible. 41 

she declares herself to be — the Minister of 
Heaven. In a" future lecture, we shall inquire 
what signs the Church should possess in 
order to make good her right to our submis- 
sion, and, secondly, whether the Roman Ca- 
tholic Communion, and it only, enjoys the 
possession of these characteristic signs. But 
I have more to say about the Bible. 



LECTURE II. 

The Bible. 

In commencing this lecture, allow me to 
repeat what I said last Sunday evening, that 
if any expression uttered in the course of 
this reading should appear harsh in itself, my 
intention is, not to give offence, but simply 
to draw out the strict logical deductions of 
my argument, in order that it may be shown 
in its full strength. 

According to the Protestant principle that 
the Bible alone is the rule of faith, every 
man, woman and child, is obliged strictly : — 
ist, to read the whole Bible — and collate its 
parts ; 2dly, to be convinced he understands 
it all. I say he is obliged to read it and un- 
derstand it. For there is question here of 
the most vital matter of fact ; what is it that 
God has revealed to man and which He wills 



The Bible. 43 

him to believed Before the bar of Omnipo- 
tent Justice, it will never do to say that, after 
a cursory examination, we had formed a prob- 
able opinion, there where we were bound to 
study till we had discovered the certain truth : 
our duty here is at least as stringent as in 
less important worldly matters. Now unless 
we read and collate the whole of Scripture, 
we cannot be satisfied that we have obtained 
the precise sehse of it, on all important mat- 
ters. I ask of you, then, is this a practical 
rule, such as God would appoint, who always 
adapts His providence to the weakness of hu- 
man nature, as it actually exists ? For how 
many persons are able to — how many really 
do, whether able or not, read the Bible thus 

carefully ? And understand it. The Bible 

must be clear indeed, if all can understand it. 
Is it thus clear ? First, no text of the Bible 
(which is the only Protestant authority on the 
matter), as we have already said, tells us so. 
Secondly, St. Peter tells us expressly the 
contrary, both in general terms, and when 



44 The Bible. 

speaking in particular of the writings of St. 
Paul. " Understanding this first," he says, 
" that no prophecy of Scripture is made by 
private interpretation," (2 Pet. i. 20.) " In all 
his (Paul's) epistles . . . are some things hard 
to be understood, which the unlearned and 
the unstable wrest, as also the other Scrip- 
tures, to their own perdition. You therefore, 
knowing these things before, beware, &c.," (2 
Pet. hi. 16.) And how does St. Paul himself 
speak on this subject ? " And some indeed 
He gave to be apostles, and some prophets, 
and others evangelists, and others pastors 
and teachers," (Eph. iv. ii.) " Are all teach- 
ers ? .... do all interpret ?" he asks in his 
epistle to the Corinthians, (1 Cor. xii. 27, 31.) 
The prophet David called on God for light to 
understand His law, and St. Augustin declared 
there were many more things in the Scrip- 
ture which he did not understand than things 
he understood. " How can I understand 
unless some man show me ?" exclaimed the 
eunuch of Ethiopia to the Apostle Philip, 



The Bible. 45 

being enlightened by the Holy Ghost as to 
his own ignorance and inability to interpret 
the prophecies concerning the Christ (Acts, 
viii.) Yet what those great and holy person- 
ages did not dare to believe of themselves, 
we are told that every uneducated, hard- 
headed, weak-minded, even stupid man, or 
woman, must think of his or her capacity. 

Protestants did not invent this theory of 
appealing to the Bible : it is as old as heresy. 
And the consequences in the time of the old 
heresies were the same confusion which is 
the result of its adoption in modern days. 
Allow me to quote a few passages from the 
early Fathers, in proof of this parallel, and to 
show in what consideration they held this 
rule. i. St. Vincent of Lerins : " But some 
perhaps may ask : — The Canon of the holy 
books being perfect and more than sufficient 
for itself, why should the authority of the 
Church be joined to it ? — I answer : Because 
the Scripture, having a sublime sense, is 
differently expounded. By one person it is 



46 The Bible. 

interpreted in one sense, by a second person 
in another sense ; so that there are almost 
as many opinions about its meaning as there 
are persons. Novatian, Sabellius, Donatus, 
Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius, Apollinaris, 
Priscillian, Jovinianus, Pelagius, Celestius, and 
finally Nestorius, admit no common interpre- 
tation. It is therefore wholly necessary, on 
account of so many subtle evasions, to take 
the sense of the Catholic Church for our rule." 
(Comm. . . n. 11.) 

Origin : " As often as heretics produce the 
Canonical scripture in which every Christian 
agrees and believes, they seem to say, Lo! 
with us is the word of truth. But we cannot 

give them credit He who reading the 

Gospel, applies to it his own interpretation, 
not understanding it as the Lord spoke it, 
truly he is a false prophet, uttering words 
from his own mind. These words may fairly 
be understood of heretics ; for they apply 
their own fables to the Gospel, and the writ- 
ings of the Apostles, expounding by their 



The Bible. 47 

own judgment, and not according to the sense 
of the holy Spirit." 

St. Irenaeus : " Not only from the evangeli- 
cal and apostolical writings, (that is, the New 
Testament) which they perversely interpret 
and wickedly expound, do these (heretics) 
attempt to prove their assertions, but also 
from the law and the prophets (that is, the 
Old Testament also). . . . They boast their 
own superior knowledge and attempt to make 
it seem credible, forming, as it were, a rope 
of sand, by adducing some words from the 
parables or sayings of the prophets, or of 
Christ, or of the Apostles ; but so as to vio- 
late the arrangement and order of the sacred 
writings, and, as far as in them lies, dissolve 
the whole connection of truth. . . . When they 
shall be agreed among themselves on what 
they draw from the Scriptures, it will be our 
time to refute them." 

St. Clement of Alexandria : " They (the 
heretics) make use indeed of the Scriptures ; 
but then they use not all the sacred books ; 



48 The Bible. 

those they use are corrupted ; or they chiefly 
urge ambiguous passages. . . opposing the di- 
vine tradition by human doctrines. . . . But it 
is clear that there is only one true church, the 
ancient one, as there is but one God and one 
Lord," 

Tertullian : " We are not allowed to in- 
dulge our own humor, nor to choose what 
another has invented. . . . What will you gain 
by recurring to Scripture, when one denies 
what the other asserts ? Learn rather who 
it is that possesses the faith of Christ ; to 
whom the Scriptures belong : from whom, 
and by whom, and when, that faith was de- 
livered by which we are made Christians. 
For where shall be found the true faith, there 
will be the genuine Scriptures. . . . Where 
this diversity of doctrine is, there will the 
Scriptures and the expounding of them be 
adulterated. . . . What Valentinus might do, 
that might his followers ; that is, change their 
belief as they liked. In one word, view nar- 
rowly all those heresies, and you will find 



The Bible. 49 

that in many things they differ from their 
founders. . . . To the Scriptures therefore an 
appeal must not be made." 

St. Cyril of Jerusalem : " Hold fast to that 
faith which the Church alone teaches, confirm- 
ed as it is by all the Scriptures. For as all 
persons are not able to read those scriptures, 
and some from ignorance, some from occupa- 
tion, are withheld from acquiring knowledge ; 
that thou mayest not through ignorance lose 
thy soul, we have comprised, in a few lines, 
the sum of Christian doctrine." — Catechism. 

St, Cyprian : " Corrupting the gospel and 
interpreting falsely, they take the last words 
and omit what goes before, retaining one part 
and craftily suppressing the other. As they 
are cut off from the Church, so do they cut 

off the words of Scripture Can two or 

three be gathered together in the name of 
Christ, who, it is plain, are separated from 
Him and His gospel ? For we did not leave 
them, but they us ; they quitted the head and 
fountain of truth." 



5o The Bible. 

St. Hilary : " When once they began (the 
Arians) to make new confessions of faith, be- 
lief became the creed of the times rather than 
of the Gospels. Every year new creeds were 
made, and men did not keep to that simplicity 
of faith, which they professed at their baptism. 
And then what miseries ensued ! For soon 
there came to be as many creeds as there 
were parties, and nothing else has been mind- 
ed, since the Council of Nice, but this creed- 
making. New creeds have come forth every 
year and every month'' — one would imagine 
Bossuet writing the history of the Variations 
of Protestantism. — <l They have changed, have 
been anathematized, and then re-established; 
and thus by too much inquiring into the faith, 
there is no faith left. Recollect that there is 
not one of these heretics who does not now 
impudently assert that all his blasphemies are 
derived from the Scriptures. They all urge 
the Scriptures without any knowledge of 
them, and without faith, talk of their faith. 
For it is not by reading, but by comprehend- 



The Bible. 5 1 

ing their sense, that the Scriptures should be 
weighed. . . . Christ (teaching from the ship) 
intimates that they who are out of the Church, 
can possess no understanding of the divine 
word. For the ship is an emblem of the 
Church, within which as the Word of Life is 
placed and preached, so they who are without, 
being as barren and useless sands, cannot un- 
derstand it." 

St. Gregory Nazianzen : " We must not all 
exercise the office of the tongue, which is the 
most prompt and ready member ; for all are 
not apostles, nor prophets, nor expounders. 
To teach is great and eminent ; but to learn 
is void of danger. You that are a sheep, why 
do you arrogate the function of the shepherd ? 
Being the foot, why will you be the head ? . . . 
Truly there should have been a law among 
us, whereby — as among the Jews young men 
were not allowed to read certain books of the 
Scripture — not all men, and at all times, but 
certain persons only, and on certain occasions, 
should be permitted to discuss the points of 



52 The Bible. 

faith. ... If these heretics may freely teach 
and promulgate their opinions, who does not 
see that the doctrine of the Church will be 
condemned, as if the truth were on their side ? 
But two opposite doctrines on the same point 
cannot possibly be true." 

Here it is well to remark that all the her- 
esies and heretical opinions of those early 
times were condemned by the Reformers and 
their followers, full as much as they were con- 
demned by these Fathers. 

Let me conclude with a few brief sentences 
from St. Augustin, and one extract from St. 
Jerome. St. Augustin : "If every art, how- 
ever low and easy of attainment, nevertheless, 
in order to be acquired, demands a teacher ; 
what can be more arrogant than not to be 
willing to learn those books of divine myste- 
ries from their proper interpreters ? . . . Her- 
esies have not arisen, nor certain pernicious 
doctrines, but from the holy Scriptures being 
ill understood, and when rash and bold asser- 
tion has been the consequence. . . . No one 



The Bible. 53 

can, certainly, attribute to the sacred writings, 
the various errors of the heretics, though they 
all endeavor to rest their false and fallacious 
opinions on that authority. . . . Whence came 
Donatus ? From what country did he spring ? 
Out of what sea did he rise ? From what sky 
did he descend ? . . . Hold fast to the Catholic 
Church ; do not depart from the rule of truth, 
and thou shalt be protected in the Tabernacle 
from the contradiction of tongues. . . . Unless 
the authority of this Church induced me to it, 
I would not believe the Gospel." 

St. Jerome : " That you may be convinced 
how necessary a guide is when you enter on 
the study of the Scriptures, " (let us reflect,) 
" I say nothing of grammarians, rhetoricians, 
philosophers, and other learned professions — 
to speak only of menial arts, which are 
learned, not by reading, but by mere prac- 
tice ; in all these, nevertheless, there must be 
some one to show the way. The art of un- 
derstanding the Scripture alone is open to 
every reader! Here, learned or unlearned, 



54 The Bible. 

we can all interpret. The tattling old woman, 
the doating old man, the wordy sophist, all 
here presume : they tear texts to pieces, and 
dare to become teachers before they have 
been taught. Some, you may see, surrounded 
by a female circle, weighing out with pom- 
pous brow their solemn phrases, and discuss- 
ing the import of the sacred oracles ; while 
others, oh shame ! are taking lessons from 
the women that they may be able to instruct 
the men. — Not to speak of those who com- 
ing to the study of the holy Scriptures from 
profane authors and the exercise of worldly 
eloquence, vainly fancy all they utter to be 
the law of God, and do not dgign to learn 
what the prophets and the apostles had 
in their mind. In support of their own 
conceptions they adduce incongruous proofs, 
not aware that to distort sentences and to 
force the reluctant Scripture to bend to 
their own wishes, argues not a superior 
understanding, but is a mode of teaching 
the most faulty. . . . The assembly of the 



^The Bible. 55 

one Church has but one faith, nor is she 
defiled by a variety of doctrines, nor rent 
asunder by heresies : she remains a virgin." 
These texts suffice : it is certain that the 
early heretics appealed to Scripture ; and 
that, on the strength of that appeal, they sub- 
divided ; and that, in view of these divisions, 
the Fathers recommended them to appeal 
rather to the Church for knowledge. " We 
are of God," says St. John, " he that knoweth 
God, heareth us." Those who refuse to do 
so, who will not " hear the Church,'* nor the 
priests of the Church, whose lips "shall keep 
knowledge, and from whose mouth they shall 
require the law," are in the eyes of these 
Fathers only objects of blame or of pity. 
And indeed to abandon the Bible and its 
sacred text thus to be " torn to pieces," ac- 
cording to the words of St. Jerome, would it 
not really be casting the holy thing to dogs 
and pearls to swine ? as literally it has been 
gathered in by the avid Chinese to make 
soles for slippers or lining for their tea-chests. 



56 The Bible. 

Thirdly, the Bible-reader must be sure of 
his translations, for there are many different 
readings of the Bible-text, and several books 
have been rejected by different sects. There- 
fore, fourthly, he should be acquainted with 
the critical value of each book and text ; he 
should be well-grounded on the controversy 
concerning the two Canons ; in fact, he 
should know the whole history of the volume. 
Therefore, fifthly, before forming his code 
and act of faith, he should make himself fami- 
liar with the original languages in which this 
work was written, the Greek, the Hebrew, 
and the Syro-Chaldaic. 

The first translations of the Reformers were 
notoriously erroneous. In Luther's transla- 
tion of the New Testament alone, i ,400 cor- 
ruptions of the text were pointed out ; not 
only did he alter and omit, but he even add- 
ed to the text. All the Reformers mutually 
abused each other on this account. In Henry 
VIII.'s translation, 2,000 corrupt readings 
were pointed out in the New Testament 



The Bible. 5j 

alone. Queen Elizabeth's was not much bet- 
ter. Finally, the elder Disraeli (father of the 
Right Honorable Benjamin) thus stigmatizes 
the translations made in England previous to 
the year 1660: " Our English (Protestant) 
Bibles were suffered to be so corrupted that 
no book ever swarmed with such innumerable 
errata. These errata unquestionably were, 
in great part, voluntary omissions, passages 
interpolated, and meanings forged for certain 
purposes," (Curiosities of Literature.) The 
present English Bible is, or may be admitted 
to be, tolerable enough for accuracy ; and yet, 
after having made an idol of this book for 
two hundred years, behold to-day all England 
risen up against it, as the old Hebrews used 
to turn against their false gods when they got 
tired of them, and declaring that it is a failure, 
that it was ill-done and coarsely-wrought, a 
shame and disgrace to their Church, that it 
must be revised, that it must be torn up and 
destroyed, and another idol put upon its ped- 
estal. Quite recently the actual Bishop of 



58 The Bible. 

Gloucester in England named in convocation 
several instances, in which " deviations from 
faithfulness are to be found" in it, — a mild 
way of saying that it was intentionally cor- 
rupted. But the translations for foreign and 
heathen nations are absurdly inaccurate. An 
Irish translation was made in which 35 varia- 
tions were discovered in the first ten pages. 
The translator of the New Testament into 
Chinese wrote, a year afterwards, that the 
Dictionary in which he was engaged " would 
gradually mature his knowledge of Chinese !" 
What kind of a translation was that man ca- 
pable of making? Yet here was the book 
which 400,000,000 of Pagans were to take on 
the ipse dixit of the publisher to be the in- 
spired word of God. I shall not speak here 
of the value of the Catholic translation, which 
every one admits to be the most correct. We 
accept our translation because it is approved 
by the Church ; but every Protestant must 
find out for himself the worth of the book he 
reads. 



The Bible. 59 

He must also settle in his own mind wheth- 
er all the books, and all parts of the books in 
the Bible, have an equal authority or not. 
The 6th Article of Religion of the Church of 
England says, that " in the name of the holy 
Scripture we do understand those canonical 
books of the Old and New Testament, of 
whose authority there was never any doubt 
in the Church ; " and it enumerates the books 
of the Old Testament, according to the Jew- 
ish division of proto- and deutero- canonical, 
denying to these last inspiration and authori- 
ty in matters of faith, and then all the books 
of the New Testament, in the order in which 
we have them. Now, see, what a gratuitous 
assumption is here contained in the first 
place ! Because there have been doubts as to 
the authenticity or inspiration of a book, does 
it follow therefore that we can deny its authen- 
ticity and inspiration ? What follows is, 
that, since these books contain many things, 
every Protestant must determine for himself 
whether they have authority or not, so as to 



60 The Bible. 

oblige him to believe what they say ? Con- 
sider, secondly, the implied misstatement 
of fact. Whatever obscurity there may be 
about the question of the deutero-canonical 
books, the fact is that the Church never did 
doubt of their inspiration; the Apostles in 
their writings quoted from them, as well as 
from the proto-canonical books ; they were 
received as inspired by the Greek and Alex- 
andrian Jews, and by the ancient heretics and 
modern Greek schismatics ; and if the an- 
cient Jews did not insert them in their canon, 
the reason was, according to Josephus, that 
through respect for Esdras, who had drawn 
up the first canon, they awaited the coming 
of another prophet, that is, the Messiah, be- 
fore adding any books to that list. Thirdly, 
remark the inconsistency. The English 
Church admits all the books of the New Tes- 
tament ; now, up to the 4th or 5th centuries, 
there were grave doubts in the Church as to 
the inspiration and authenticity of some of 
these, and several others were considered by 



The Bible. * 61 

many during that period as inspired, which 
have since been rejected. After the breaking 
out of the Reformation, Luther again and 
the other Reformers discarded several of 
these books. He threw away the book of 
Revelations or Apocalypse, the epistle to the 
Hebrews, and the epistle of St. James — 
which he called an epistle of straw, for the 
reason that it denied his favorite theory of 
justification by faith alone, to maintain which 
he inserted the word " alone" after the word 
faith in the epistle of St. Paul to the Ro- 
mans, and, when accused of having done so, 
his answer was : " So I will, so I command. 
Let my will be instead of reason. Luther 
will have it so." Here now is a pretty knot- 
ty point, which every Protestant must clear 
up for himself before setting to read the 
Scripture ; for, if the decision of the Church 
does not appear to him to be invested with 
sufficient authority by God to make him cer- 
tain about it, it is scarcely probable that the 
voice even of Martin Luther, or the Articles 



62 The Bible. 

of the Church of England, will suffice to put 
his mind at rest. 

But suppose the Protestant reader has 
settled to his own satisfaction the question of 
the authority of the different books and all 
the parts of them, and is quite at ease as to 
the fidelity of his own vernacular translation, 
there is an anterior question still, which he 
must solve before being able to apply his 
rule of faith. This question is the non-cor- 
ruption and integrity of the original text. In 
the original mannscripts, written in a variety 
of different languages, there are a great many 
different readings ; for example, the famous 
controverted text, of so great importance in 
proving the existence of the Blessed Trinity. 
" There are three who give testimony in 
heaven, " is found in some manuscripts, in 
others it is not. Again, in other parts, have 
we the text entire and complete ? is there no 
break, nothing omitted, which may change 
the whole sense and meaning of the passage ? 
The authors of the extant portion of the Old 



The Bible. 63 

Testament tell us of a great many books 
which are lost, — it has been calculated, as 
many as twenty — which were probably in- 
spired. Strange, by the way, if the written 
books are to be our rule of faith, that God 
should not have preserved what he deemed 
necessary to complete His revelation, and 
without which His law cannot be wholly 
known ! He then who admits the private 
reading of the Bible as his only means for 
knowing the word of God, must enter upon 
all this study, if he wishes to build his act of 
faith on a solid foundation, that is, his own 
personal certitude, and not on the faith of cri- 
tics or translators, on a mere probability and 
chance. For he who will not admit the au- 
thority of the Church, cannot receive that of 
man. What a prospect opens before him ! 

But the most important point remains yet 
to be settled. Sixthly, then, and finally, he 
must be certain of its inspiration. I have my 
Bible, and I understand it : how do I know 
that it is inspired ? There are 46 books of 



64 The Bible. 

the Old Testament, and 27 in the New, written 
at different intervals, during the space of 1600 
years. How am I to know that each one of 
these books was inspired ? By the nature ot 
the things related in them ? Niebuhr, the 
German critic, has destroyed the fine edifice 
of early Roman history left to us by Titus 
Livy, far more creditable, on the face of it, 
than are many things related by the writers 
of the sacred books. These would long ago 
have lost all credence, without waiting for a 
Colenso or a Renan, had they nothing but 
the intrinsic evidence of truth to support 
them. Is it by the style of the writers ? their 
sentiments, their piety ? How many works 
of modern authors there are, full as devout, 
as elevated in thought, as some of these 
writings, which no one ever dreamed of call- 
ing inspired ! That wonderful book, the 
Following of Christ, which is the consolation 
of so many millions, does it not bear as stroug 
intrinsic marks of being inspired, as, say, the 
Book of Chronicles, or the Book of Ruth, or 



The Bible. 65 

Paul's Epistle to Philemon ? Is it on account 
of the character of the writers ? Learned 
Protestant divines have excluded the Gospels 
of Sts. Mark and Luke, because they were 
not apostles, but only disciples of the apostles ; 
and they have asked, if you admit inspiration 
in the writings of the disciples, why should 
St. Barnabas' epistle be denied it ? But then 
tvhst becomes of the rule of faith, if the writ- 
ings of the apostles are ipso facto inspired, 
and they only are inspired ? For it is cer- 
tain that we have lost many of their letters, 
of St. Peter's, for instance, only to speak of 
him ; St. Peter spent seven years at Antioch, 
and twenty-five at Rome, and did he write 
only two letters ? for we have remaining of 
him only two letters. Why also in that case 
do we reject the Gospels of Sts. Thomas and 
Bartholomew, who were apostles, when we 
receive those of Luke and Mark ? why re- 
ceive Paul's letter to the Romans (who no- 
where says that he wrote to the Romans) 
and reject that bearing his name to the 



66 The Bible. 

Laodiceans ? Any such rule, it is plain, is 
altogether arbitray, and every rule adopted 
by Protestants for judging of inspiration, is 
arbitrary. 

I will tell you, my dear friends, whence you 
have derived your belief in the inspiration of 
holy Scriptures, from the tradition of the 
Roman Catholic Church, from nowhere else. 
If she had not given them to you, you would 
not even have known them. She alone has 
kept them by the care of her monks and 
learned men. She alone has given you the 
authentic translation of them. She alone has 
furnished you with the list of the truly in- 
spired books, dismissing those which were 
apocryphal ; and on Her evidence and testi- 
mony alone — it is impossible to assign any 
other reasonable motive — do you believe that 
they are inspired. The eminent and learned 
Cardinal Wiseman did not fear publicly to 
say that " having perused, with great atten- 
tion, all that has fallen in my way from Pro- 
testant writers on this subject (of inspiration), 



The Bible. 67 

I have hardly found one single argument ad- 
vanced by them that is not logically incorrect, 
so that if I had not higher grounds on which 
to rest my belief, they could not have led me 
to adopt it. 

This higher ground is the authority of the 
Catholic Church, without which, says St. Au- 
gustin, I would not believe even in the Gos- 
pel, " Ego vero Evangelio non crederem, nisi 
nee Catholicae Ecclesise commoveretautoritas. ,, 
And how could he ? Even the tradition, the 
historical testimony of the Church, does not 
suffice to make us believe in inspiration. If 
the affirmation of the Church have only a hu- 
man authority, it establishes certainly indeed 
the authorship of these books, their integrity 
and correct preservation, and it satisfies the 
historical critic of the truth of the facts related 
in them. But Inspiration is an interior thing, 
an invisible action of the Spirit of God on the 
mind and hand of the writer, a secret dicta- 
tion by which he is urged to write, perhaps 
without being- conscious of the fact himself, 



68 The Bible. 

and directed in what he writes, so that he be- 
comes an instrument rather than an author, 
and the production finally of his pen is not 
his own invention but the very word of God. 
Now this invisible action above and beyond 
the range of human eye or thought, no one 
can witness to but God Himself, and it is on 
the word of God Himself alone that we can 
believe it to have existed — a word, a witness, 
preceding intellectually, logically, the exist- 
ence of the Bible as an inspired book. This 
word, this witness, this authority, preceding 
every other in the order of Christian know- 
ledge and instruction, is the basis, the first 
foundation of all Christian faith. This word 
of God, this Voice of God, telling us the Bible 
is inspired, which unless we hear and believe, 
we cannot, at least logically, and above all su- 
pernaturally, believe the Bible to be inspired, 
where is it? what is it? You have heard it; 
for you believe the Bible to be an inspired 
book. But you accept the Bible as such only 
on the authority of the old Catholic Apostoli- 



The Bible. 69 

cal and universal Church. The authority then 
of that old ever-lasting Church, is for you, as 
for me, the basis, the solid foundation of your 
belief, the instrument through which God 
speaks, the Voice of God. The authority of 
the Church of God, built on a rock, is finally, 
for you, for me, and for every Bible Christian, 
his first, his only Rule of Faith. 

Notwithstanding the Protestant principle 
the Bible is the rule of faith, as its unlimited 
private interpretation was found to lead only 
to infinite division, every denomination has 
felt it necessary to adopt some certain formu- 
lary or profession or confession of faith, to 
which its members and ministers are obliged 
to subscribe, and those who refuse to do so, 
become thereby another sect. Thus the 
Church of England agreed on 39 Articles of 
religion : now, to speak only of these — for the 
same thing could be said of the other formu- 
laries — whether they be articles "of faith," or 
articles "of peace," as they have been called, 



Jo The Bible. 

they are put down either as facts which the 
individual reader of the Bible has no right to 
controvert, or as a compromise. If as facts, 
then there is an end to private interpretation, 
and we have the Catholic rule that the autho- 
rity of the Church is to be our guide and di- 
rector. If as a compromise, a compromise 
between whom and what ? Between truth and 
error ? between Christ and Anti-christ ? But 
" what concord hath Christ with Belial ? or 
what part hath the faithful with the unbeliev- 
er ? And what agreement hath the temple of 
God with idols ? What participation hath 
justice with injustice ? or what fellowship hath 
light with darkness ?" The Church of Christ 
can hear of no compromise. 

This necessity for coming to an understand- 
ing led to the famous distinction of fundamen- 
tals and non-fundamentals. To keep them- 
selves from dissolution, while depending on 
the Scripture alone for authority and light, 
and at the same time, to frame some answer 
against the Catholic controvertists who were 



The Bible. 7 1 

constantly casting up to them their innumera- 
ble divisions, so opposed to that unity which 
the Saviour had promised to His Church, the 
leaders of the Reform declared that it was re- 
quired only of all Christians to agree on the 
fundamental points of the Christian religion, 
and that these only were all sufficiently clearly 
expressed in Scripture. Now, not to speak 
of the injury thus offered to the written Word, 
as though everything proceeding from the 
mouth of God did not deserve the implicit 
homage of our belief, or could have been re- 
vealed by Him, the Lord of Majesty, except 
with the supreme design, whatever apparently 
unimportant point it might regard, since, after 
all, it was revealed, of being expressly, uncon- 
trovertedly, and unhesitatingly believed, on 
His authority, by man — not to speak of this, 
who gave these gentlemen the right to deter- 
mine between fundamental and non-funda- 
mental points ? Where was their Scripture 
warrant for it ? There is no word about such 
distinction in the holy writ. 



72 The Bible. 

Perhaps it may sound plausible and satis- 
factory enough, at least to perplexed or un- 
reflecting persons, to say : All the essential 
points of the Christian religion are sufficiently 
clear. To know whether such is really the 
case, however, two questions must be pre- 
viously decided ; first, which are the essential 
articles of religion, and, secondly, whether all 
those who admit this distinction are agreed 
as to these articles. Here again I may ask, 
who has the right, not admitting the authority 
of the Church in the matter, to determine 
what are essential and fundamental points of 
faith, and what are not ? The fact is how- 
ever that, to this day, no common under- 
standing has been come to on the subject. 
The Episcopalian thinks that the distinction 
between the order of bishops and the order 
of priests is fundamental ; the Presbyterian 
thinks that it is not, or, rather, that the con- 
fusion of the two is fundamental. The Trini- 
tarian holds assuredly the belief in the dis- 
tinction of three persons in one God to be 



The Bible. 73 

fundamental ; the Unitarian holds that it is 
not, and, on the contrary, that the unity of 
person is ; the one maintains the divinity 
of Jesus Christ ; the other reduces him to 
the mere rank of a creature. Is it essential 
or not, to know whether there are sacraments 
in the Church, and how many there are, and 
what their nature is, whether they be mere 
exterior signs and ceremonies, or instruments 
of supernatural grace ? whether any sacra- 
ment be necessary to salvation ? whether 
salvation be possible out of the Church of 
Christ ? — whether it be a sin, and, if not a 
sin, whether it be profitable or not, to honor 
and invoke the Blessed Virgin and the Saints? 
whether these four words, "This is my body," 
really mean what they literally signify, and 
are held to mean by the Roman, Greek, and 
Lutheran churches, or whether they imply 
the direct contrary " This is not my body ?" 
whether these words have a clear and funda- 
mental signification for us in Scripture, " All 
things whatsoever they shall tell you, observe 



74- The Bible. 

ye and do," and " An heretical man avoid ?" 
whether, finally, diversity of opinion in what 
are called non-essentials be not an obstacle, 
and uniformity in some things which may 
appear unimportant be not a necessary con- 
dition to salvation ? — for, after all, the Roman 
Catholic Church, containing 200,000,000, the 
half, at least of the Christian world, with the 
Greek Church, a very large body also, aftirms 
that it is, while only the Protestant division, 
quite a minority, denies it. Who will decide 
these questions ? 

In the same communion, among those who 
have embraced the same profession of faith, 
you will find every variety of opinion as to 
what is fundamental. Thus in the Church of 
England — I specify the Church of England, 
because it is the Protestant body with which 
we are all best acquainted — some maintain 
that baptism is necessary to salvation, others 
that it is not, — these parties are now about 
equally divided ; some teach that the minis- 
ters of the Gospel have received a sacred 



The Bible. 75 

character and exercise priestly functions, and 
others that they are jn no way distinguished 
from the rest of men ; some believe in the 
power of absolution, the Real Presence of 
Christ in the Communion, others reject these 
doctrines violently. " For this " (admittance 
to her communion) " she " (the established 
Church, "requires only belief in the Apostles' 
Creed," says Dr. Pusey. The dean of West- 
minster and the new bishop of Exeter would 
probably be far from allowing that she re- 
quired so much. The Master of the Rolls, in 
a late legal decision, declared that all that 
was necessary in order to possess a living in 
the Church of England, w T as not to deny the 
supremacy of the Queen. The national 
French Protestant synod of Charenton in 
1631, admitted to the Calvinistic communion 
the Lutheran protestants, who believed in 
the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament, 
which the Calvinists denied. The synod of 
Dordrecht in Holland, also Calvinistic, ex- 
cluded from communion the Arminians, who 



76 The Bible. 

were followers of Calvin in everything except 
his harsh doctrine on predestination. Now 
the Lutherans, who adored Christ in the 
Host, were idolaters in the eyes of the' Hu- 
guenots ; yet they were admitted to Com- 
munion, and those who denied only absolute 
predestination to sin and hell were excluded ! 
Worldly interest was the real motive of all 
these re-unions. Interest was what made 
that compromise which is called the Church 
of England ; and the interest of his subjects, 
for whom an united religion appeared to him 
as desirable as an united fatherland, was 
what determined probably the late King of 
Prussia to oblige his Lutheran and Calvinistic 
subjects to bend their necks to one common 
religious yoke. They do things according to 
military system in Prussia ; but we have seen 
lately in the United States a re-union, or 
marriage, it was called, effected between the 
old-school Presbyterians and the Presby- 
terians of the young school. Now, if I am 
not mistaken, the bone of contention be- 



The Bible. jj 

tween these schools, was that same question 
of predestination, which caused division and 
civil war among the Calvinists of Holland. 
Is the true belief on this point fundamental 
or not ? 

A learned author has enumerated 24 es- 
sential points of the Christian faith, which 
certainly are not clearly expressed in Scrip- 
ture ; for example, the perpetual virginity of 
the mother of God ; St. Matthew, i. 2 5, says : 
" He (St. Joseph) knew her not till she brought 
forth her first-born son." On -the strength of 
this passage, which appeared to give some 
color to his interpretation, Helvidius main- 
tained that the Virgin afterwards had other 
sons, and he was condemned as a heretic by 
Sts. Augustin and Jerome, each of whom 
wrote a book against him. The question 
therefore of the fundamentals is a difficult 
one. Yet those who make this admission, 
maintain in the same breath that every one 
can easily find out in the Bible what is ne- 
cessary for salvation. In reality, this inven- 



78 The Bible. 

tion of fundamentals is nothing but a substi- 
tution of formularies of men in the place of 
both the divine authority of the Church and 
the written word of God. It destroys all 
belief in the inspiration of Scripture ; for, if 
great portions of that volume are not neces- 
sary to be believed, but have been handed 
over, as the world is said to have been, to 
the disputes of the children of Adam, who 
will believe that anything in the book was 
ever dictated by Almighty God ? who will 
believe on the authority of mere sects of men, 
that the Infinite Wisdom has condemned us to 
dive in search of pearls of truth into an ocean 
of words in a book, which, while it is our only 
guide in our search, nowhere says in what part 
that truth is to be found, which portion of it- 
self is inspired and which is not, which is of 
necessity to be believed and which is not, 
which is verily and indeed the word of God 
and which is merely the production of the 
labor of man ? This distinction has greatly 
contributed to diminish respect for the sacred 



The Bible. jg 

' volume, and confidence in any of its state- 
ments ; and its assertion was one step to- 
wards those final general results of Protest- 
antism and free inquiry which we witness 
everwhere around us at the present day, in 
the rationalism, the utter indifference as to 
religion, and the spirit of ^ universal doubt, 
which are the characteristics of the times in 
which we live. 

If the divisions of Christendom are only on 
account of non-essential points, why did it 
ever divide ? why do the sects divide among 
themselves? And why did they separate 
from the Catholic Church, which, according 
to them all, believes in the fundamental ar- 
ticles of the Christian faith ? If this distinc- 
tion of fundamental and non-fundamental 
points, unknown even to the early heretics, 
be true, what could justify Martin Luther in 
going out of the Church ? If he discovered 
errors in the Church of Rome, since they re- 
garded only non-essential points, about a 
thousand of which all Christians most in- 



80 The Bible. 

evitably disagree, was not he, a Priest of that 
Church, obliged to avoid giving the great 
scandal of rending by schism the seamless 
garment of the Spouse of Christ, and destroy- 
ing that beautiful outward unity which is one 
of the most imposing marks of the true worship 
and religion of a one and indivisible God ? 
These questions are all the more pertinent 
because, when a certain number of Reformers, 
calling themselves orthodox, and giving the 
epithet of heterodox to all those who will not 
hold what they hold, would have agreed on 
a certain number of points as fundamental, 
could they make an act of faith on the sub- 
ject ? They would have nothing for them 
but their own opinion. Confessedly, since 
they do not claim infallibility, they would 
opine merely that these are the fundamental 
articles, and that others are not. They may 
be mistaken ; to-morrow they may see a 
reason for thinking otherwise ; but, until 
then, they believe that this is the Christian 
faith. Is this the realization of the plan, the 



The Bible. 8 1 

desire and promises of Christ? Did He 
provide no better method of making known 
to men His revelation ? of securing that unity 
in His Church which He prayed for to His 
Father. " Father, make them one, as We 
are one?" of conveying that certitude, with- 
out which the mind of the sincere Christian, 
and especially the soul anxious for its eternal 
safety, cannot rest ? For what soul that has 
read these words in holy Writ, " Depart from 
me, ye cursed," " Work out your salvation 
in fear and trembling," " He who shall not 
believe, shall be condemned," — can repose and 
sleep in the quiet assurance that it opines 
this point to be fundamental in the Christian 
religion, and that other to be a non-essential 
one which to-morrow it may judge to be of 
necessary credence for salvation ? 

Are these men willing to lay down their 
lives and die for the truth of their conviction. 
Look to and survey the scene of Protestant 
and Catholic missions for the answer. No 
year passes without the soil of some pagan 



82 The Bible. 

land being bedewed with the blood of lonely 
Catholic martyrs. Bible missionaries are to 
be found too ; but, as a Protestant writer 
says, in their comfortable homes, with " the 
inevitable gun-boat" lying close to the bank 
for their protection. There are very many 
good persons yet, I trust, who, educated in 
prejudice against the Catholic Church, and 
sincerely believing the truths which they 
have been taught, with that good faith which 
makes them pleasing unto God, would be will- 
ing to lay down their lives, if necessary for 
the Christian religion ; and, in the first en- 
thusiasm of reform, under the excitement of 
fanaticism, numbers of men, who, while 
claiming liberty for all, with an inconsistency 
not uncommon to human nature, showed 
themselves to be most intolerant, exulted 
when the opportunity was offered of expos- 
ing their lives and shedding their blood in 
what they believed to be the cause of God, 
and of His Gospel. But that zeal which 
springs from enthusiasm or fanaticism dies 



The Bible. 83 

away with the disappearance of its cause. It 
has died out in the Turks ; it has died out in 
the Jews ; it has died out in the sects ; and 
there are very few men at the present day 
willing to go the length of sacrificing their 
life's blood in witness of the Bible being the 
only rule of faith. The Roman Catholic 
priest by the side of some obscure bed of 
contagious disease (as four of our Fathers of 
St. Francis Xavier's in the course of two 
years who sacrificed their lives on Blackwell's 
Island) ; the simple Sister of Charity ; the 
poor Catholic neophyte bending beneath the 
rattan in the Corea and in Tonquin ; the 
humble and suffering Catholic missionary 
under the sun of Guinea or amid the icy 
wastes of Lapland ; these may rejoicingly 
lay down their lives for the faith which they 
profess, because in them burns the same fiery 
conviction of the truth which consumed the 
hearts of the apostles who converted Europe 
and the martys who died in the amphithea- 
tres of ancient Rome. 



84 The Bible, 

The consistency of the Church's teaching 
with regard to the Scriptures stands in strong 
contrast with the variations of the Reformers 
and their followers. At first these insisted 
upon clinging to the very letter of the written 
text ; now their followers, in great number, at- 
tach very little value to the text whatever. 
At first they declared that the Bible was clear 
for all ; now many admit that it is most ob- 
scure. At first their rule was private inter- 
pretation, then professions of faith, then the 
interpretation of the Spirit, then the interpre- 
tation of reason alone. They explain the 
Bible by itself, by taste, by the laws of criti- 
cism, both as to its meaning and as to its in- 
spiration. At first they admitted some books 
and rejected others, as they pleased ; then 
they adopted the Jewish canon, though neither 
the Jews nor the earliest Fathers were agreed 
as to which were the canonical books of Scrip- 
ture. At first the whole Bible was the law ; 
then the essential fundamental points only 
were made necessary to be believed ; and 



The Bible. 85 

now these, the 19th century men of England, 
Germany, and North America, have reduced 
to mighty few indeed. 

The Catholic Church alone collected and 
preserved the Scriptures during the persecu- 
tions of the early ages. She kept them dur- 
ing the inroads of the Barbarians and the wild 
ages which followed. She alone can account 
for them, determine their canon, prove their 
inspiration, and explain their meaning. She 
has always interpreted them consistently and 
uniformly, giving to them their obvious and 
natural sense, accepting all their teaching — 
as, for example, that on Extreme Unction for 
the dying, which is so clear in holy writ, and 
yet denied by all the sects — deducing from 
them a code of doctrine suited to a superna- 
tural religion, a religion of self-denial, mortifi- 
cation and humility, as taught in the myste- 
ries of the Incarnation and Atonement. And 
therefore she is always the same. Her ene- 
mies may quarrel among themselves, or they 
may be reconciled, like Pilate and Herod, 



86 The Bible. 

when they unite in enmity to her. But she 
is ever one and Catholic, to-day as in the 
days of Constantine, whether she appears in 
the persons of 900 venerable men, gathered 
from all the extremities of the earth in solemn 
and glorious Council, or whether she appears 
as one old imprisoned man of 80, the object 
of the world's derision and of the love of all 
his children, she is one and Catholic, the faith- 
ful guardian of the word of God, the unchang- 
ing expounder of the faith. 



LECTURE III. 

The Church. 

Why are you a Catholic ? This is a ques- 
tion which every child of the Church should 
be ready at all times to answer satisfactorily, 
according to the admonition of the Apostle 
St. Peter, " being always ready to satisfy 
every one that asketh you a reason of the 
hope which is in you," (i Pet. iii. i5.) I am a 
Catholic because I believe the Catholic Church 
to be the true and only Church of Christ. 

Christ did establish a Church : this is ad- 
mitted by all Protestants. Besides there is 
frequent allusion to the fact in Scripture. 
(Matt. xvi. 1 8.) "Thou art a rock," says 
Christ to one of his apostles, " and on this 
rock I will build My Church." " If he will 
not hear them," He says, in another place, 
" tell the Church ; and if he will not hear the 



88 The Church. 

Church, let him be to thee as the heathen and 
the publican," (Matt, xviii. 17.) Elsewhere 
he speaks of His Church, according to the 
oriental style, under different figures. Thus 
He says to His disciple, Simon : " Feed My 
lambs, feed my sheep," (Jn. xxi. i5.) And 
Jn. x. 16 : " Other sheep I have that are not 
of this fold : them also I must bring . . . and 
there shall be one fold and one shepherd." 
In Matt, xxii., He likens it to a kingdom and 
a marriage feast; and Matt. v. 14, to a city 
seated on a mountain. After His death and 
ascension we see that His Church continued 
to exist and began to spread. " Saul ravaged 
the Church," we are told in the Acts of the 
Apostles, viii. 3. " The Church indeed had 
peace throughout all Judea and Galilee and 
Samaria," (ib. ix. 31.) And from these pas- 
sages we understand also what that Church 
was, namely : a society of persons united in 
obedience to the law revealed by Christ. 

Does this Church still continue to exist at 
the present day ? There are two ways of ex- 



The Church. 89 

amining this question. The first would be to 
commence from its origin, and, continuing to 
follow its history through successive genera- 
tions, to see whether it has really persevered, 
the same in character and individuality, in un- 
broken and permanent duration, down to the 
time in which we live. The second method 
is to consider whether Jesus Christ has assign- 
ed certain essential marks or signs by which 
we are to recognize His Church, which His 
Church will always openly claim and plainly 
manifest, a'nd without the possession of which, 
any body pretending to be, or to be of, His 
Church, will want the necessary titles to en- 
sure confidence in the validity of its claim. 
This method is the shorter, and perhaps the 
more satisfactory one. The inquiry is simply 
historical. Does the Bible, taken as an his- 
torical book, relate that Jesus Christ, its foun- 
der, designated certain characteristics by which 
he intended to distinguish His true Church 
from all other organizations of spurious growth 
which might in the course of ages endeavor 



go The Church. 

to deceive men into the belief that they were 
in possession of the real revealed and Christian 
mode of worship ? And is the evidence of 
contemporaneous facts sufficiently strong to 
warrant us in asserting that there is one body, 
and only one, this day in existence, which 
both claims for itself and possesses all these 
specified characteristics, against which claim 
and which possession no solid argument not 
capable of being satisfactorily answered can 
be advanced, and which body therefore should 
be admitted by all reasonable men to be real- 
ly and truly the very Church established by 
Christ for the preservation and diffusion of the 
doctrine which He revealed and wished to be 
taught for the salvation of all men ? 

The first characteristic of the Church of 
Jesus Christ, assigned by its founder, is its 
divine origin : " My doctrine is not mine/ 7 
he says (Jn. vii. 16.) " but of Him who sent 
me ;" the true Christian Church cannot be of 
human origin. " He that speaketh of him- 
self," adds the Saviour, " seeketh his own 



The Church. 91 

glory ; but he that seeketh the glory of him 
that sent him, he is true." The second is 
its unity. " There shall be one fold and one 
shepherd/' he says (Jn. x. 16) : " I am the 
good shepherd ; and I know mine, and mine 
know me." This unity was foretold by the 
prophets and insisted on by the apostles : — 
" My dove is one," says the spouse in the 
Canticles, (vi. 8,) " she is the only one of her 
mother, the chosen of her that bore her." 
" Thou art beautiful, O my love, sweet and 
comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army set 
in array," (ib. vi. 3.) " We, being many," 
writes St. Paul to the Romans (xii. 5), " are 
one body in Christ, and each one members 
one of another." And to the Ephesians (iv) : 
" I therefore, a prisoner, beseech you that 
you walk . . . careful to keep the unity of the 
spirit in the bond of peace. One body and 
one spirit, as you are called in one hope of 
your calling. One Lord, one faith, one bap- 
tism. One God and Father of all, who is 
above all, and through all, a!nd in us all. . . . 



92 The Church. 

He gave some indeed apostles, and some 
prophets, and some evangelists, and others 
pastors and doctors. ... for the building up 
of the body of Christ ; until we all meet in 
the unity of faith. . . . that henceforth we be 
no more children tossed to and fro, and 
carried about with every wind of doctrine by 
the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness by 
which they' lie in wait to deceive. But acting 
truthfully in love, we may in all things grow 
up in him who is the head, Christ : from 
whom the whole body, being compacted and 
fitly joined together, by what every joint sup- 
plieth according to the operation in the 
measure of every part, maketh increase of 
the body unto the building of itself in charity/ ' 
Is not this insisting on unity ? " Is Christ 
divided?" he exclaims, in writing to the Cor- 
inthians (i Cor. i. 13). Christ himself had 
said that " every kingdom divided against 
itself shall be made desolate, and every city 
or house divided against itself shall not stand." 
(Matth. xii. 2 5). " A man that is a heretic," 



The Church. 93 

he (Paul) writes to Titus (iii. 10), who was a 
bishop, " after the first and second admoni- 
tion, avoid; knowing that he that is such an 
one, is subverted and sinneth, being con- 
demned by his own judgment." How con- 
demned by his own judgment ? St. John 
answers (1 Jn. ii. 19) : " They went out from 
us ; but they were not of us. For if they 
had been of us, they would no doubt have 
remained with us." Therefore St. Paul " be- 
seeches " the Romans : " I beseech you, 
brethren, to mark them who make dissen- 
sions and offences contrary to the doctrine 
which you have learned, and to avoid them,' , 
(Rom. xvi. 17.) And St. John, in his epistle 
to Electa pushes the doctrine of excommuni- 
cation very far, when he says : " If any man 
come to you and bring not this doctrine, 
receive him not into the house, nor say to 
him, God speed you. For he that saith unto 
him, God speed you, communicateth with his 
wicked works," (2 Jn. 10.) After all, this is 
not stronger than to say, as the Saviour did, 



94 The Church. 

" He who heareth not the Church, let him be 
to you as the heathen and the publican. " 
But it supposes that the Church is indeed 
" the pillar and the ground of truth," the one 
" house of the living God," the one ark out 
of which there can be no salvation. Finally, 
in testimony of this sign of unity being par- 
ticularly intended to distinguish His Church, 
we have Christ's prayer to his Father, of- 
fered up after his last supper, immediately 
before separating from His disciples to go 
forth to His passion : " Holy Father, keep 
them, in Thy name, whom Thou hast given 
Me ; that they may be one, as we also are. . . 
that they also may be sanctified in truth. 
And not for them only do I pray, but for 
those also who through their word shall be- 
lieve in Me : that they all may be one, as 
Thou, Father, in Me, and I in Thee : that 
they may be one in us : that the world may 
believe that Thou hast sent Me. . . that they 
may be one as we also are one. I in them 
and Thou in Me : that they may be made 



The Church. 95 

perfect in one ; and the world may know- 
that Thou hast sent Me, and hast loved 
them, as Thou hast also loved Me," Jn. xvii. 
It would be difficult to speak more earnestly. 
And this unity which Christ asks for can 
hardly be supposed to mean some loose con- 
nection of charity and good-will ; for he asks 
for the most intimate union possible, " that 
they may be one as we are one," that their 
union may be like that of God the Father 
and God the Son, whose state of co-existence 
is not so much that of unity as of identity, 
identity of nature, identity of substance, 
identity of individual being. I have chosen 
to abound in selecting passages in proof of 
this point, on account of its importance. 

The third character or property of the 
Church, is its exclusiveness. This follows 
from some of the texts I have just quoted. 
"He who will not hear the Church," says 
our Lord, " let him be to thee as the hea- 
then and the publican," (Matth. xviii. 17.) " Go 
ye into the whole world, and preach the 



96 The Church. 

Gospel to every creature. He that beliveth 
and is baptised, shall be saved ; but he that 
believeth not, shall be condemned," (Mark 
xvi. 1 5, 16.) il We are of God," writes St. 
John. " He that knoweth God, heareth us : 
he that is not of God, heareth us not : by 
this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit 
of error," (1 Jn. iv. 6.) The fourth mark is 
authority in its teachers. This is manifest in 
all the letters of the apostles, remarkably so 
in those of St. Peter. " We are of God," 
says St. John ; " he that knoweth God, 
heareth us," " He that heareth you," said the 
Savior, " heareth me ; and he that despiseth 
you, despiseth me," (Luke x. 16.) " He that 
heareth not the Church, let him be as the 
publican." " Go, teach all nations." And in 
particular to St. Peter : " Feed my lambs, 
feed my sheep." The fifth mark of the 
Church is its Visibility. Necessarily so ; for 
every human society is visible. An invisible 
Church, that is, a grand human society bound 
together by some intelligible tie, which never- 



The Church. gy 

theless remains unknown, is a contradiction 
in terms. Ah, it is true that,^ while the body 
of the Church, which is an exterior, sensible 
organization, contains both good and wicked, 
the good only make up the soul of the 
Church, that is, the number of those who 
possess actually divine grace, and that these 
are known only to God, the searcher of 
hearts. But to say that the public, organized 
society, which Christ formed for the preser- 
vation of the deposit of his revelation, is 
something undiscoverable to human know- 
leege, is to bewilder our reason and to con- 
tradict our common sense. " A city seated 
on a mountain cannot be hid. Neither do 
men light a candle and put it under a bushel, 
but upon a candlestick, that it may shine to 
all in the house," (Matth. v. 14, i5.) Of 
what house does our Lord speak? of 4 'the 
house of God, which is the Church of the 
living God, the pillar and ground of the 
truth " (1 Tim. iii. i5.) " And evidently great," 
adds the Apostle (1 Tim. iii. 16) " is the 



98 The Church. 

mystery of godliness, which has been preached 
.... which is believed :" — great by the evi- 
dence of the Church. " In the last days," 
says the prophet Isaias (ii. 2, 3.), "the moun- 
tain of the house of the Lord shall be pre- 
pared on the top of mountains, and it shall 
be exalted above the hills. . . . And many 
people shall go and say : Come and let us go 
up to the mountains of the Lord, and to the 
house of the God of Jacob, and He will teach 
us His ways, and we will walk in His paths/' 
" A path and a way shall be there ; and it 
shall be called the holy way : the unclean 
shall not pass over it ; and this shall be unto 
you a straight way, so that fools shall not err 
therein," (Is. xxxv.) Therefore a visible 
way. 

The sixth distinctive mark of the Church 
of Jesus Christ is the possession of inerrancy. 
This follows from what precedes. If Christ 
gave the authorities in His Church power to 
teach the truth, since the truth never changes, 
so long as His Church continues His, it will 



The Church. 99 

teach nothing but the truth. We cannot sup- 
pose that Christ would have ^given it other 
power. And when we see all men ordered 
to submit to its teaching, and anathema pro- 
nounced on him who adopts any other doc- 
trine, we must conclude that God the Father 
will watch by His divine providence over this 
Church, established by His Son, so as to pre- 
vent it from ever teaching error, unless He 
wishes to stultify His own work, and, what is 
most repugnant to His own infinite veracity, 
to oblige men to accept falsehood as the truth. 
Several of the texts already quoted from 
Scripture, imply necessarily the existence of 
this attribute in the Church : in fact, all those 
which go to prove its right to speak with au- 
thority. " Go teach all nations." Teach 
them what? anything but the truth? " Be- 
hold I am with you," (Matt, xxvii. 20.) What 
does Christ mean by this promise of His pre- 
sence, " I am with you ?" Evidently, what 
the parent says to its tottering child afraid to 
fall : " Walk without fear, I will keep you 



ioo The Church. 

up ;" what the master says to his servant, or 
the sovereign to his subject, about to execute 
his orders : " No harm can befall you, I will 
take care of the consequences." Christ's pro- 
mise to "be with" His disciples in their teach- 
ing, means that He will protect them from the 
danger accompanying teaching, namely : error. 
" He that will not hear the Church, let him be 
to thee as the heathen." " He that heareth 
you, heareth me." " He that will not believe" 
your teaching "shall be condemned." "We 
are of God. He that is not of God, heareth 
us not. By this we know the spirit of truth 
and the spirit of error." " Feed my lambs, 
feed my sheep." With what ? With the 
truth, surely. Other texts, if possible, even 
more explicit, might be adduced. " I will 
build My Church, and the gates of hell shall 
not prevail against it," (Matt. xvi. 18.) They 
would prevail if error could enter therein. In 
His discourse, after the last supper, Christ re- 
peatedly promises to His disciples the direc- 
tion of the Spirit of truth. " I will not leave 



The Church. 101 

you orphans. ... I will ask the Father, and 
He shall give you another paraclete (or con- 
soler), that he may abide with you forever, 
the Spirit of truth. . . . But the paraclete, the 
Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in 
My name, he will teach you all things, and 
bring all things to your mind, whatsoever I 
shall have said to you," (Jn. xiv. 16-26.) " He 
will teach you all truth," (ib. xvi. 13.) " But 
when the paraclete cometh, whom I will send 
to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, 
who proceedeth from the Father, he shall 
give testimony of Me, and you shall give tes- 
timony," (ib. xv. 26, 27.) At the first Coun- 
cil, held in Jerusalem, which was composed, 
not only of the Apostles, but of a large num- 
ber of other chiefs of the Church, their disci- 
ples, a decree was enacted, which we find in 
full in the Acts of the Apostles (ch. xv.), de- 
claratory of what the whole pagan world at 
that time converted to Christianity, was to 
practice by the will of God. This decree 
commences with the following remarkable 



102 The Church. 

words : " It hath seemed good to the Holy 
Ghost and to us." The assumption of infal- 
libility could not be expressed in more forci- 
ble terms. Other passages, condemnatory of 
communication with heretics, furnish another 
proof of the existence of inerrancy in the 
Church. " Bear not the yoke with unbelievers," 
says St. Paul to the Corinthians, (2 Cor. vi. 
14.) Therefore they must know who unbe- 
lievers are. " What part hath the faithful 
with the unbeliever ? . . . For you are the 
temple of the living God. . . . Wherefore go 
out from among them, and be ye separate, 
saith the Lord," (ib.) In the third chapter of 
the Second Epistle to Timothy (I change as to 
the order) % : " Know that in the last days shall 
cofne . . . men corrupted in mind, reprobate 
as to the faith, always learning and never 
coming to the knowledge of the truth ; as 
Jannes and Mambres resisted Moses, so these 
resist the truth . . . Now these avoid." Those 
who live in the last days will have to be sure 
that they possess the truth themselves, and 



The Church. 103 

are not merely learning, in order to obey this 
injunction. " There were also false prophets 
among the people," says St.Teter, (2 Pet. ii. 
1.,) " even as there shall be among you lying 
teachers, who shall bring in sects of perdition, 
and deny the Lord who bought them, bring- 
ing upon themselves swift destruction 

Leaving the right way they have gone 
astray," (ib. i5) — he blames them for their er- 
ror. " These are fountains without water and 
clouds tossed with whirlwind, to whom the 
mist of darkness is reserved. For speaking 
proud words of vanity . . . promising liberty, 
they themselves are the slaves of corruption," 
(ib. 17-19.) " Little children," says St. John, 
" even now there are many Anti-christs. . . . 
They went out from us . . . that they may be 
manifest, that they were not all of us," (1 Jn. 
ii. 18, 19.) Enough for the moment on this 
subject. 

The seventh gift with which Christ endow- 
ed His Church was perpetuity. This follows 
from the very nature of Christ's mission and 



104 The Church. 

the object of His Church. He came for the 
salvation of all men : He died for all ; the ob- 
ject of His Church was that His doctrine, by 
which men were to be saved, should be pro- 
pagated and preserved. So long then as the 
generations of men shall continue to succeed 
each other, His Church will have the same 
object of its existence. He would not there- 
fore have provided these generations with the 
means of knowing the way of salvation, if He 
did not assure to His Church the channel 
through which that knowledge was to be con- 
veyed, a duration coextensive with the exist- 
ence of the human race. The need of the 
human race to know the truth is always the 
same. If even in the times of the Apostles 
false teachers arose, against whose errors the 
voice of a Church, speaking as Jesus Christ 
Himself, " Not like the Scribes and Pharisees, 
but as having authority, " was necessary, in 
order that the faithful might not be at a loss 
know what to believe, that necessity became 
still greater when these first heralds of the 



The Church. io5 

faith has been removed by death. Indefecti- 
bility, moreover, was necessary in order that 
this perpetual Church might be always able to 
fulfil the object of its mission. This indefec- 
tibility means that the existence of the Church 
should be uninterrupted, that she should never 
fall into a state of deliquium, or trance, so 
that she would not be able to make her voice 
heard or to be recognized — that at no given 
period she would fail in the accomplishment 
of the purpose of her creation, the perpetual 
promulgation with infallible inerrancy of the 
divine law revealed by Jesus Christ. This 
follows from the fact that the same need of 
authoritative instruction exists in one age, in 
one generation, as in another. It would be a 
gratuitous supposition to assert that the con- 
stitution of the Church ever underwent a radi- 
cal change : what it was in the days of the 
Apostles and their first disciples, that it 
must always have been and be. So it was 
established by Christ. Scripture, history, say 
nothing of any revolution effected or to be ef- 



106 The Church. 

fected in its nature. " Go teach all nations," 
said Christ, " and behold I am with you all 
days, even to the consummation of the world." 
(Matth. xxviii. 20.) Not with the Apostles 
in person ; they died before the Church was 
a hundred years old ; but in the persons of 
their successors. " To the consummation of 
the world," — here is a promise of perpetuity. 
" All days" — here is indefectibility. " On this 
rock I will build my Church, and the gates of 
hell shall not prevail against it." If that 
Church should cease to exist, while the gene- 
rations of men continued to be born, or exist- 
ing should ever, through corruption or other- 
wise, fall into such a state that it would be im- 
possible for them to recognize her voice, she 
would then no longer, of course, be the organ 
for communicating Christian truth to men : 
this would be an evil, and it would conse- 
quently be just to say that the gates of hell 
had prevailed against her. 

Eighthly, therefore, as a consequence, Christ 
must have attached to His Church the mark 



The Church. 107 

of sanctity : sanctity in her doctrine, since it 
was His, and in her fruits of holiness ; " He 
chose us, says the apostle (Eph. I. 4), " that 
we should be holy and unspotted in His 
sight." To these we may add the two notes, 
as they are called, of apostolicity and Catho- 
licity : apostolicity because the Church to 
which the mission was given to " preach," 
must descend in legitimate succession and 
without disconnection from the apostles ; Ca- 
tholicity, or universality, because her mission 
is to teach " all nations." These three last 
notes, with that of unity, (and they sufficiently 
resume the others) are declared in the Nicene 
or Constantinopolitan creed, which may be 
found in any edition of the Book of Common 
Prayer of the Church of England, in this 
article : " I believe in the one, holy, Catholic, 
and apostolic Church." 

Such is that city seated on a mountain 
which is the Church of Christ ; and these 
four marks expressed by the Fathers of Con- 
stantinople, are, as it were, the four cardinal 



io8 The Church. 

points from which she may be regarded in 
order to be recognized. Such she undoubtedly 
was in the time of the apostles, and, if she 
exists at all, such she must be to-day. 

Another question may be examined here, 
as its answer will disclose to us an additional 
distinguishing feature of the true Church 
founded by Jesus Christ. How was that per- 
petual Church to preserve the deposit of His 
revelation confided to its care ? Was it to 
be kept in writing, or handed down orally 
from mouth to mouth ? or was it to be pre- 
served partly in each of these ways ? That 
by mere oral transmission the whole revela- 
tion of Christ might be preserved intact and 
unaltered till the end of time, is possible, 
through a special providence of Almighty 
God. No one asserts, however, that such has 
been the case : it would hardly have become 
the plan of the Creator, who, even in the 
supernatural order, adapts his ways sweetly 
and wonderfully to the wants of man's nature 
and condition, to thus violently and forcibly, 



The Church. 109 

as it were, have maintained the integrity and 
purity of His revelation, by an almost manifest 
miracle. Two probable ways maybe supposed 
in which the divine law might have been 
entrusted to the keeping of an authoritative 
Church : the first would be the giving to it a 
complete written code, of which it was to be 
the. future interpreter. Thus God did with 
the Jews. Until the time of Moses there 
was no written law. The law of nature and 
the dictate of reason, by which men were 
then governed, were made manifest to each 
individual by the voice of conscience speak- 
ing within him, confirmed, as it was, by "the 
authority of parental instruction and the com- 
mon sense of mankind. If there were any 
positive additional precepts, as, for example, 
the law of sacrifice, these were transmitted 
orally from father to son, and from generation 
to generation. This was not difficult in a 
primitive age, when the lives of men were 
long, and the precepts they had to observe 
were few. At all events here was a purely 



1 10 The Church. 

traditional law, that never was written, which 
lasted from the days of Adam to Noah, and 
from Noah to Abraham, and from Abraham 
till the Jews had gone out from the land of 
Egypt. Then the ceremonial law, detailed 
in great minuteness and precision in the 
books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, was 
revealed to the great Jewish legislator. Did 
Christ thus commit His whole law to His 
Church ? Protestants say that he did, and 
that we have it in the Bible, especially in the 
books of the New Testament. I will not 
discuss again the question of private inter- 
pretation. But if we regret that theory, as 
untenable in itself, and opposed to what we 
have said in this lecture of the office of the 
Christian Church, it would be still very rea- 
sonable to suppose that Christ, following the 
example of Moses, and indeed of nearly all 
lawgivers, would have delivered his whole 
code of legislation completely written out, to 
the constituted authorities in His Church 
that according to it they should judge, rule 



The Churth. 



in 



and govern. Catholics say that He did not 
do so however, but adopted the other more 
remarkable method, namely, that he made 
known His whole law orally, and orally 
only, to His disciples ; that these then com- 
mitted it gradually to writing, the whole of 
it ; that in doing so, sometimes they were in- 
spired, and sometimes they were not ; that 
the pages they were inspired to write com- 
pose what is now called the New Testament, 
which does not, at least explicitly, contain all 
that Christ revealed ; that the rest of His re- 
velation is to be found in other writings not 
inspired, which have been preserved till our 
time, and which, by a special protection of 
divine providence, will be sufficiently pre- 
served for no part of the Christian revelation 
ever to be forgotten, so long as the Christian 
Church is destined to exist ; and that it is 
the office of the Church, guided by that holy 
Spirit, which her founder promised to her 
should " dwell " with her " all days," teaching 
her " all truth," to declare to her children 



H2 The Church. 

what in those writings was of divine origin, 
and which, being part of the deposit of divine 
revelation, it was obligatory for them to be- 
lieve, and, if preceptive, to practice. That 
this should be so is possible, since Christ was 
free to act in this matter as He pleased. It is 
therefore a question of fact. Let us consider 
then the arguments by which Catholics un- 
dertake to prove the truth of this position. 

In the first place, Christ never wrote a line 
himself. We are not told of His having 
ever written but once : that was when the 
Jews brought to Him a woman accused ot 
adultery, when he leaned down and wrote, 
as it is supposed, some of the secret sins of 
her accusers ; but he wrote them so that 
they might be effaced — in the dust. Every, 
one of the books in the New Testament was 
written either by one of the apostles or by 
their disciples. Therefore Christ did trans- 
mit His whole revelation orally, and not in 
writing. 

Secondly ; He never told His disciples to 






The Church. \\% 

write. He bade them go and " preach." 
And the fact is that they did not write, ex- 
cept as occasion required that they should 
explain certain points to certain portions of 
the Church. So Matthew wrote an abridg- 
ment of the life .of his master, in order to com- 
municate more easily to the early Christians 
the knowledge of the facts it contained. St. 
John terminates his narrative of the actions 
of the Saviour with this remark : "if they 
were written every one, the world itself, I 
think, would not be able to contain the books 
that should be written." And all the letters 
of St. Paul were evidently written as the ur- 
gency of some occasion required. The apos- 
tles might have easily composed at least a 
Catechism. The idea does not appear to have 
ever occured to them. It is certain that they 
did not write even the Creed which bears 
their name. 

Thirdly ; the writings in the New Testa- 
ment bear internal evidence that they were 
never intended to form a complete code of 



1 14 The Church. 

doctrine. The law of Moses is perfect, clear, 
distinct, and precise. The books of the New 
Testament, on the contrary, have no legal 
form ; they have little or no connection with 
each other. They are : first, four short lives 
of Christ, two of which were not written by 
Apostles ; then an incomplete narrative of 
some of the doings of one or two of the 
Apostles, written by Luke, a companion of 
St. Paul ; then a number of hasty letters writ- 
ten by Paul to different congregations of 
Christians ; then a few letters of some of the 
other Apostles ; and, finally, a most obscure 
series of prophecies, revealed to St. John on 
the island of Patmos. They bear so unmis- 
takeably the character of occasional writings 
that it requires a strong act of faith to believe 
that they were inspired : it would be doing 
violence to our reason to suppose that they 
were intended for a code of laws. Could 
Jesus Christ, who was to perfect the work of 
Moses, especially foreseeing, as he did, the 
future controversies which were to arise in 



The Church. 1 1 5 

the Christian world, have willed that His law 
should be drawn up in so imperfect and unsa- 
tisfactory a fashion, when He might have had 
it written out in a clear, complete, and me- 
thodical manner ? 

Fourthly, there is no word in Scripture 
which says that the whole revelation is con- 
tained in the Bible alone. This circumstance, 
taken in connection with the fact that Christ 
wrote nothing Himself, and ordered his Apos- 
tles, not to write, but to " preach" and to 
" teach," should convince us that He never in- 
tended His revelations to be confided formal- 
ly to writing. On the contrary, we find fre- 
quent allusion, especially in the Epistles of St. 
Paul, who of all the Apostles was himself the 
one who wrote most, to the mere oral tradi- 
tion of the faith, as the method to which Chris- 
tians should attach themselves and on which 
they should rely. " Now I praise you, breth- 
ren," he writes to the Corinthians, (i Cor. xi. 
2), " that in all things you are mindful of me, 
and keep my ordinances, as I delivered them 



1 1 6 The Church. 

to you." To the Thessalonians : " Therefore, 
brethren, stand firm, and hold the traditions 
which you have learned, whether by word or 
by our epistle," (2 Thess. ii. 14.) And again : 
" And we charge you, brethren, in the name 
of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you withdraw 
yourselves from every brother walking disor- 
derly, and not according to the tradition 
which they have received of us," (ib. iii. 6.) 
" Hold the form .of sound words," he writes 
to Timothy, in his second epistle (2 Tim. i. 13) 
— and notice, by the way, how particular he 
was even about the expression of doctrines, 
" hold the form of sound words — which thou 
hast heard from me in faith, and in the love 
which is in Christ Jesus ;" and further on (ii. 
2): "And the things which thou hast heard 
from me, before many witnesses, the same 
commend to faithful men, who shall be Jit to 
teach others also T and finally (iii. 14) : " But 
continue thou in the things which thou hast 
learned, and which have been committed to 
thee, knowing of whom thou hast learned." 



The Church. 117 

Thus the early Christians did not receive their 
religious instruction through the eye, but 
through the ear. Through prevision, as it 
were, of the future dissensions among those 
who, not only in our times, but in the earliest 
ages of the Church, proclaimed that the whole 
Bible alone, self-interpreted, was the only rule 
of faith, our Saviour seems to have willed that 
His word should be propagated, not by writ- 
ing, but by " preaching," and the knowledge 
of his faith acquired, not by reading, but, in 
the words of the Apostle, " by hearing/' 
(Rom. x. 17.) " Therefore we also give 
thanks to God without ceasing/' writes St. 
Paul to the Thessalonians, " because that 
when you had received from us the word of 
the hearing of God, you received it, not as the 
word of men, but (as it truly is) the word of 
God," (1 Thess. ii. 13.) Christ reproved the 
Jews for believing in traditions, but they were 
the traditions of men, the unauthorized tradi- 
tions of the Pharisees, mere excrescences on 
the Mosaic law of God. To the Galatians : 



1 1 8 The Church. 

" As we said before, so I say now again : If 
any one preach to you a gospel besides that 
which you have received, let him be anathe- 
ma," (Gal. i. 9.) The question is always 
about preaching, never about writing. 

Fifthly ; it was only at the close of the 
fourth century, that the question, which are 
the canonical books of the New Testament, 
was finally settled. And it was settled by 
tradition. There was no other way of know- 
ing which of the books then in circulation as 
inspired were genuine, and which were spu- 
rious. The same tradition alone during that 
period could tell whether the whole revela- 
tion was contained in these books or not, 
since the Scriptures themselves say nothing 
on the point. This tradition is contained in 
the writings of the Fathers who lived during 
that interval. Now these Fathers assert the 
very contrary. I will quote a few passages 
from some of them. 

St. Irenaeus : " Had the apostle left us no- 
thing in writing, must not we then have fol- 



The Church. 1 19 

lowed that rule of doctrine which they de- 
livered to those to whom they entrusted 
their churches ? To this rule many bar- 
barous nations submit, who, deprived of the 
aid of letters, have the words of salvation 
carefully written on their hearts, and jealously 
guard the doctrine which has been delivered." 
Tertullian : " To know what the apostles 
taught, recourse must be had to the churches 
which they founded, and which they in- 
structed by word of mouth and by their 
epistles. ... If the truth then be adjudged to 
us who embrace the rule which the Church 
received from the apostles, the apostles from 
Christ, and Christ from God, heretics, it is 
plain, cannot be allowed to appeal to the 
Scriptures. . . . Another rule should rather be 
pursued. The question is : — To whom was 
that doctrine committed by which we are 
made Christians ? For where this doctrine 
and this faith shall be found, there will be 
the truth of the Scriptures, their exposition 
and the exposition of all Christian traditions. 



120 The Church. 

... If Scripture has here defined nothing, 
surely usage has ; which usage has arisen 
from tradition. For had it not been delivered, 
how could it have attained praqtice ? But 
you say, even in speaking of tradition, some 
written authority is necessary. Let us in- 
quire whether no tradition should be admitted, 
unless it be written. I will allow that it 
should not, if no example of other practices 
can be adduced which we maintain on the 
sole title of tradition and the strength of 
custom, without the smallest written au- 
thority." Here he quotes some of these 
practices : " Of these and other usages, if 
you ask for the written authority of the 
Scriptures, none will be found. They spring 
from tradition, which practice has confirmed, 
and obedience ratified." ( De Coi r onamilitu.) 
Eusebius : " The disciples of Christ, im- 
parted their lessons, sometimes in writing, 
and sometimes by word of mouth, as things 
to be observed by an unwritten rule. . . . 
These truths, though they be consigned to 



The Churth. 1 2 1 

the sacrea writings, are still, in a fuller man- 
ner, confirmed by the tradition of the Ca- 
tholic Church, which Church is diffused all 
over the earth. This unwritten tradition 
confirms and seals the testimonies of the 
holy Scripture." 

Origen : " The Gospels are but four, as I 
have received from tradition, which alone are 
admitted, without controversy, in the univer- 
sal Church of God." 

St. Cyprian ; " Know then that we are in- 
structed to observe what Christ delivered in 
offering the chalice, and to depart from no- 
thing of which he set us the example. The 
chalice which is offered up in remembrance 
of Him, must contain wine and water." 
(There is no mention of this in Scripture). . . 
" It is easy for minds that are religious and 
simple, to lay aside error and discover truth ; 
for if we turn to the source of divine tradition, 
error ceases." On this passage St. Augustin 
makes this comment : " The advice which 
Cyprian gives to recur to the tradition of the 



122 The Church. 

apostles, and thence to bring down the series 
to our own times, is excellent and manifestly 
to be followed." It was to this Cyprian that 
St. Stephen, the then bishop of Rome, wrote : 
" Let no innovation be introduced ; but let 
that be followed which is handed down to us 
by tradition ;" namely, not to rebaptize here- 
tics* 

St. Athanasius : " Let us again consider 
from the earliest period the tradition, the 
doctrine, and faith of the Catholic Church, 
which God first delivered, the apostles pro- 
claimed, and the succeeding Fathers fostered 
and preserved. On these authorities the 
Church is founded." 

St. Epiphanius : " We must look also to 
tradition, for all things cannot be learned 
from the Scriptures. For which reason, the 
holy apostles left some things in writing, and 
others not. Which Paul himself affirms. . . . 
We have the traditions of the apostles, and 
the holy Scriptures, and the succession of 
doctrine and truth diffused all around. . . . 



The Church. j 2 -i 

Who is the best informed? an insignificant 
mortal who made* his appearance yesterday ? 
or the witnesses who lived before us, and who 
held that doctrine in the Church which they 
had received from their predecessors, in the 
same manner as the Church continues to the 
present day to maintain that true and genuine 
faith which came to her from her fathers ? 

St. Basil : " Truly your influence must be 
great if we should prefer your inventions to 
the tradition of faith. . . . Among the points 
of belief and practice in the Church, some 
were delivered in writing, while others were 
received by apostolic tradition. . . Both have 
equal authority : if we attempt to reject as 
matters of little moment, such points as were 
not written, we shall, by our imprudence, 
offer a signal injury to the Gospel, confining 
the whole preaching of faith to a mere name 
.... The day would not suffice me were I 
to enumerate all those points which have 
been thus delivered. ... It is apostolical to 
adhere to unwritten traditions. ... It is the 



124 The Church. 

common aim of all the enemies of sound 
doctrine, to shake the solidity of our faith in 
Christ, by annulling apostolic tradition. . . . 
They dismiss the unwritten testimony of the 
Fathers as a thing of no value. . . . Separate 
not the Holy Ghost from the Father and the 
Son ; let tradition deter you. For so the 
Lord taught, the apostles preached, the 
Fathers maintained, the martyrs confirmed. 
Be satisfied to speak as you were instructed/' 

St. Augustin : " Were the custom of bap- 
tizing infants not of apostolic tradition, it 
should not be admitted. . . . Which practice 
came down from apostolic tradition ; as many 
things which are not found in their epistles, 
nor in later councils, and yet, because they 
are observed through the Church, are believed 
to have descended from the apostles.. . . What 
the whole Church observes, what was not 
decreed by councils, but always retained, is 
justly believed to be of apostolic origin. ,, 

St. Jerome : " Though there were no Scrip- 
ture authority, the consent of the whole world 



The Church. 125 

would carry with it the weight of a command. 
For many things that by tradition are ob- 
served in the churches, have acquired the 
authority of a written law." (Said as by a 
heretic, but admitted by Jerome.) 

St. John Chrysostom : (on 2 Thess. ii. 14) 
S\ Hence it is plain that all things were not 
delivered in writing, but many otherwise ; 
and are equally worthy to be belived. Where- 
fore let us hold fast to the traditions of the- 
Church. It is tradition : let that suffice." 

St. Ignatius Martyr, (according to Euse- 
bius) : " As he was led through Asia. . . and 
entered the several cities, in his exhortations 
to the churches, he admonished them to hold 
fast to the tradition of the apostles, which 
tradition, confirmed by his own testimony, 
for the more sure information of posterity, he 
deemed it necessary to commit to writing." 

Sixthly ; both the Jews and Protestants 
have believed firmly, as of faith, many things 
of which no mention is made in Scripture, 
and which are known only by ecclesiastical 



126 The Church. 

tradition. The old Scripture said not a word 
to the Jews about their own inspiration ; it 
was known to them therefore only by the 
authoritative tradition of the synagogue. So 
also the remedy for original sin for females, 
of which no mention is made in Scripture, as 
well as for boys who died before the eighth 
day, on which they were to be circumcised ; 
and for the gentiles. So also only by tradi- 
tion they knew that their bloody sacrifices 
were figurative of the death of the Messiah. 
Protestants accept tradition when they appeal 
to the Fathers. And, in fact, critically speak- 
ing, we are more easily certain of the truth 
of an universal tradition, founded on a consen- 
sus Patrmn, than we are of the incorruption 
of a certain text in a book, as the Bible. 
But they admit a great many other things : — 
The procession of the Holy Ghost from the 
Son ; the perpetual virginity of Mary, Mo- 
ther of Christ (there is a text of Scripture 
which seems to deny it, which I have already 
quoted,) ; the necessary form of baptism for 



The Church. 127 

its validity ; the value of baptism adminis- 
tered by infidels, heretics, or sinners ; the 
validity of baptism by aspersion or-sprinkling 
instead of by immersion ; infant baptism 
(Christ's words seem to exclude infants, for 
he says, he who will believe and is baptized, 
shall be saved,) ; the observance of Sunday 
instead of the Sabbath, Saturday ; the dispen- 
sation from washing feet (Christ bade His 
disciples wash each others feet), the permis- 
sion to eat blood and the flesh of strangled 
animals (the apostles, Act. xv, forbade all the 
gentile converts to do so) ; the Apostles' 
Creed itself, in fine, which is not found in 
Scripture, and the assertion which it contains 
of Christ's descent to Limbo. 

Tradition is the natural way of transmitting 
religious knowledge, by instruction from father 
to son ; in many cases the necessary and only 
possible way. It was the way in which the 
early Patriarchs propagated their faith and 
hope of a Redeemer to come. The Jews did 
not read, but were taught. As we learn from 



128 The Church. 

the Book of Esdras, having lost their know- 
ledge of the old Hebrew, during the captivity, 
which lasted for 14 generations, and changed 
their language from Hebrew to Chaldaic or 
Syriac, after their return, they could not even 
read their sacred books. Even in civil socie- 
ties we find the existence of a traditional law 
parallel and equally obligatory with the statu- 
tory code. The common law of England and 
the United States is a remarkable example 
of the case. " The Municipal law of Eng- 
land," says Judge Blackstone, "may be divid- 
ed into the lex no7t-scripta } the unwritten or 
common law, and the lex scripta, or statute 
law. . . . The common law is the first ground 
and chief corner-stone of the laws of England. 
... If the question arises : how these cus- 
toms and maxims are to be known, and by 
whom their validity is to be determined ? the 
answer is : by the judges in the several courts 
of justice. They are the depositories of the 
law, the living oracles who must decide in all 



The Church. 129 

cases of doubt, and who are bound by oath 
to decide according to the law of the land." 

Those apostolic traditions of the^Christian 
Church, which St. Ignatius, martyr, wished to 
be committed to writing, are now to be found 
in the writings of the Fathers, confirmed by 
the Acts of Councils, of Saints, and Martyrs, 
by liturgies, rites, ceremonies, worship, the 
works of theologians, ecclesiastical history, 
ecclesiastical approbations and condemnations, 
and especially to-day, by ancient monuments 
of every sort, by epitaphs, inscriptions, medals, 
pictures, statues, ornaments of jewelry, em- 
blems of every kind buried in the catacombs. 
When, as Blackstone says, " the judges of the 
several courts," that is, the bishops of the 
Church, have examined these various sources, 
that which they find, according to St. Augus- 
tin, to have been " not decreed by Councils, 
but observed by the whole Church, and al- 
ways retained," Catholic and perpetual — in 
the words of St. Vincent of Lerins, believed 
semper et ubique et ab omnibus, in all places, 



130 The Church. 

at all times, and by all — that they, with the 
same Augustin, " justly believes to be of 
Apostolic origin/' and proclaim it such. In 
virtue of Christ's promise that he would send 
His divine Spirit upon His Church, to teach 
it all things, and prevent it from falling into 
error, and of the supernatural providence by 
which He is bound to watch over the preser- 
vation of His revealed tradition, when the au- 
thorities in the Church, after prayer, have 
completed their research, they possess not 
only a natural certitude as to what is of apos- 
tolic tradition, but a divine assurance as dis- 
tinct and peremptory as the Church's author- 
itative interpretation of the written word. 

In another lecture we shall see whether the 
Catholic Church possesses all these attributes 
of the true Church of Christ. Let us remark 
at present that she claims to possess them all, 
and that no other church has even claimed so 
much; so that either the Christian Church 
has no existence, or the Catholic Church is 
the Christian Church. 



LECTURE IV. 

The Church. 

In our last lecture we enumerated the char- 
acterizing marks by which the true Church 
of Christ can be distinguished from every 
other ; divinity of origin, visibility, perpetuity, 
authority in teaching, exclusiveness, inerran- 
cy, and the four notes enumerated in the 
Nicene Creed, unity, sanctity, apostolicity, 
and Catholicity, or universality. Simply to 
establish the necessity of the existence of 
these features in the Church, is almost enough 
to prove that the Catholic Church must be 
that Church, since she alone claims to pos- 
sess them all, and, consequently, if she be 
not that Church, the Church of Christ has 
ceased -to exist. It would be impossible in 
the course of one hour, to enter into a full 
proof of the right by which the Catholic 



132 The Church. 

Church claims these titles. What I propose 
doing this evening, is, simply, to point out 
some strong lines of argument in her favor, 
and then to insist a little more fully on one 
of those qualities, which is perhaps the one 
which most strongly recommends itself at 
the present time, to the attention of persons 
anxious to know the Unth. 

In the first place, as to the origin of the 
the Church, she certainly had no other 
founder but Jesus Christ. She is eminently 
the " old Church." We know when Martin 
Lutner was born, and when he died, and we 
know when John Calvin died, and when 
Henry VIII. died, and when his daughter 
Elizabeth died, as we know when Arius lived 
and flourished and died, and when Nestorius 
and when Macedonius and Eutyches lived 
and died. Before Arius there was no Arian 
Church ; before Nestorius there was no Nes- 
torian Church ; before Eutyches there was 
no Eutychian Church ; before Luther there 
was no Lutheran Church. But no man can 



The Church. 133 

name any founder for that which is called to- 
day the Catholic Church other than Jesus 
Christ. She can therefore claim divinity of 
origin, and the note of apostolicity inasmuch as 
she descends from apostles ; and the sign 
of perpetuity, at least so far as, judging from 
the past and present, it is allowed to us to 
penetrate into the future. For she has out- 
lived a thousand churches, of which she has 
seen the rise, the progress, the decay ; and 
at this day, 1 800 years after her birth, she is 
as vigorous as ever she was, as full of life ; 
her children are as muoh attached to her as 
ever, and there is no reason to suppose that 
she who has survived through so many 
changes of kingdoms and races, so many re- 
volutions and convulsions and transformations 
of society, of schools, of ideas, of manners of 
living, thinking, and doing — there is no rea- 
son to suppose that she will not survive with 
the same vitality through all the like muta- 
tions that are yet to come. 

She can vindicate for herself the marks of 



134 The Church. 

unity and Catholicity. I place these two at- 
tributes in juxta-position ; because it is her 
Catholicity which strongly reveals her unity, 
and it is her unity which preserves and ex- 
plains her Catholicity. The Church is Ca- 
tholic. From the day the apostles went forth 
to carry the sound of the Gospel to the ends 
of the earth, the Church has existed every- 
where ; she has been the Church universal. 
But she is everywhere the same, she is Ca- 
tholic and one. And this is what distin- 
guishes her from the sects. Everywhere 
you will find different churches, everywhere 
you will find heresies : but they are not 
everywhere the same ; the heresy of Ar- 
menia is not the heresy of Egypt, the heresy 
of Egypt is not the heresy of Abyssinia, the 
heresy of Abyssinia is not the heresy of 
Greece, the heresy of Greece is not the 
heresy of Germany. But the Catholic Church 
is everywhere, at all times, the same. The 
existence of this great communion, the Ro- 
man Catholic Church in all parts of the world, 



The Church. 135 

at every epoch of time, is a fact so patent as 
to admit of no denial. Therefore we can 
claim for the Church the note of Catholicity 
— and, I may add, undoubtedly, of visibility. 
But let us consider a little this mark of 
unity, that we may see whether the Catholic 
Church really possesses, in its perfection and 
fullness, that unity which jesus Christ wished 
to exist in His Church. We have seen in 
our last lecture how the inspired writers in- 
sist on the existence and preservation of this 
unity in the Church. We have seen that 
Christ intended it should be the most abso- 
lute unity possible in a corporate body. Christ 
himself compares that unity to the unity 
which exists between the three divine Per- 
sons in the Godhead. His apostles compares 
it to the union which joins together all the 
members of the same one human body, and 
again to the sanctity of the marriage tie. 
Now no loose connection, no general kind of 
agreement, will realize the idea of compact 
oneness which is conveyed to us by these 



! 36 The Church. 

similes. The efforts of the sects, regularly 
repeated from time to time, to come to some 
kind of mutual understanding, prove too 
clearly how wofully they are conscious of not 
possessing the least appearance even of this 
unity. What then ? has the Church of Christ 
proved a failure ? It needs no argument to 
show that such a close connection as the Ro- 
man Catholic communion must possess, in 
order to verify its claim to be the one and 
only Church of Christ, could only be the 
effect of the operation of the Spirit of God 
Himself, watching, according to Christ's pro- 
mise, over the preservation of His Church. 
No human agent or motive could keep thou- 
sands of millions of men of every variety of 
nationality and character, during sixty gen- 
erations, united in one same submission of 
belief, of worship, practice, and obedience. If 
such a phenomenon has been and endured, 
surely, unless we deny the existence of a God, 
we must say, the finger of God is here— this is 
the work of the hand of the Most High. The 



The Church. 137 

unity of the Catholic Church is threefold, — ■ 
and observe how well she deserves to be 
called one under each aspect : unity of go- 
vernment, unity of faith, unity of worship. 
She has one head, the successor of the apos- 
tles, at Rome ; under him are patriarchs ; 
then come metropolitans ; then bishops ; 
then priests, each pastor in his parish ; and 
finally, the simple faithful. Truly she is " an 
army in array," composed of rank and file ; 
she is a body made up of members " fitly 
joined together." Her belief on every point 
which she teaches as of faith, is everywhere 
absolutely the same : and any one that would 
cease to believe as the rest of her children, 
would, by the very fact, cease to belong to 
her communion. Take a Catholic catechism 
printed in China, and another printed in 
Syria, or at San Francisco, or in Lapland ; 
you will find them identical in their doctrine, 
even to the very form of its expression. 
But have there not been different schools 
of doctrine in the Church ? On points which 



138 The Church. 

were not of faith, yes ; on points defined as 
of faith, no. That Catholics should disagree 
on points whereupon Jesus Christ has made 
no revelation, or as to which they do not 
know what revelation He has made, is as 
natural and inevitable as that men should dis- 
agree on political questions who have con- 
sented to live under the same form of civil 
government. But when the Church has 
spoken, all submit to her voice, and so unity 
is preserved. This right of the Church to 
speak to decide controversies, to make new 
definitions of faith, and how such a right can 
be reconciled to perpetual identity of belief, 
we shall consider shortly. The third unity 
of the Church is unity of worship, of rite. 
Go where you will throughout the Catholic 
Church, you will find one sacrifice : at every 
hour that " clean oblation " which the pro- 
phet Malachias foretold should be offered up 
" from the rising of the sun even to the going 
down, in every place," is being made on some 
altar. Everywhere you will find the same 



The Church. 139 

sacraments, administered with the same ma- 
terials and according to the same form ; and 
everywhere you will find the same hierarchy 
oi anointed ministers for this office of sacri- 
fice and for the administration of these sacra- 
ments. And this triple unity of government, 
faith, and worship, the Church believes to be 
of divine tradition, and essential to her exist- 
ence as a Church. 

" Christ loved the Church," says St. Paul 
(Eph. v. 25), " and delivered himself up for 
it, that He might sanctify it . . . that He 
might present it to Himself a glorious Church, 
not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, 
but that it should be holy and without blem- 
ish." The Church of Christ must be holy. 
The Catholic Church is holy, first, in her doc- 
trine, and, secondly, in her fruits of holiness. 
Formerly many points of her doctrine were 
assailed as being contrary to holiness. I can- 
not here enter into the justification of them 
all in detail. But her enemies, who are al- 
ways veering from one extreme to the other, 



140 The Church. 

have now generally abandoned that ground 
of attack, and complain rather of the severity 
and too great austerity of her teaching, She 
obliges her children to fast, and to confess 
their sins, to receive the sacraments at cer- 
tain epochs, to be present at divine service, 
under pain of mortal sin. She prohibits 
marriage within certain wide degrees of kin- 
dred, and will allow no divorce. She obliges 
us to be as careful of our thoughts as of our 
words and actions. She has been accused 
of worshiping Mary as God. This is not 
true : she honors Mary only as the most 
favored and powerful of creatures, the crea- 
ture chosen and made worthy to be the Mo- 
ther of Him who was the Son of God. She 
has been accused of granting indulgences as 
a license to commit sin. This also is not 
true : the condition, and the motive, of grant- 
ing indulgences, is that men should repent of 
sin, change their hearts, and purpose firmly 
never in any way to offend God grievously. 
Martin Luther and John Calvin taught that 



The Church. 141 

man is justified by faith alone without good 
works. A lecture delivered by a Protestant, 
Mr. Baring Gould, and published lately in an 
English Protestant'journal, shows how crude 
was Luther's teaching on this all-important 
point of morality. The Church teaches, with 
St. Paul, that though a man have faith so as 
to remove mountains, and have not charity, 
he is nothing (1 Cor. xiii. 2), and, with St. 
James, that faith, if it have not works " is 
dead in itself" (James ii. 17), that conse- 
quently, according to these apostles, faith can 
exist without works or charity, but that faith is 
vivified, and man is sanctified, not by faith, 
but by divine charity infused into his soul by 
God, which, expelling by its very presence, 
sin and all attachment to sin, is alone able to 
produce fruits of salvation. Protestantism, 
by opposing the confession of sins, celibacy, 
and submission to the authority of the Church 
in interpreting Scripture, has favored man's 
natural love of self-assertion and personal 
comfort. The Church, conscious that mans 



142 The Church. 

noblest privilege is to obey, and his greatest 
triumph not only to know himself but to 
overcome himself, constantly inculcates hu- 
mility and self-denial. Jesus Christ was 
poor, " poor and in labors from His youth :" 
the Church commends voluntary poverty, for 
the love of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was a 
virgin and the son of a virgin-mother : the 
Church commends voluntary chastity, for the 
love of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was 
obedient " unto the death, even the death of 
the cross :" the Church commends voluntary 
obedience, for the love of Jesus Christ. The 
Protestant clergyman is forced by no law to 
risk his life in the spiritual service of his 
neighbor : the Catholic priest is obliged, un- 
der pain of the gravest dereliction of his 
duty, to affront certain death in order to 
bring succor to the souls committed to his 
charge ; and what year in this metropolis 
does not witness additions to the list of these 
victims of priestly sacrifice? All the mem- 
bers of the Church cannot be expected to 



The Church. 143 

be saints. Christ himself has taught us that 
many tares will grow up with the good wheat. 
The children of the Church are in a state of 
being sanctified : the apostles were not all 
saints while under the tuition of their divine 
Master, far from it. But the Church of Christ 
must bring forth eminent fruits of sanctity. 
Read the lives of our canonized saints. You 
do not know, my dear friends, how rigorous 
the Church is in her examination of the facts 
concerning those whom she is called upon to 
pronounce heroic in their virtue. But why 
speak of saints ? Look at our Sisters of 
Charity ; look at our missionaries ; where 
will you find the like outside of the Catholic 
Church. Where else will you find the Little 
Sisters of the poor, the Sisters of the Good 
Shepherd, the Sisters of Mercy, the Carme- 
lites who spend their lives in prayer? I 
have yet to hear of whole nations converted 
by Protestantism. I have yet to hear of 
Protestant martyrs for the faith among the 
heathen. Every year the blood of Catholic 



144 The Church. 

priests and bishops, and nuns, and native Ca- 
tholics, waters the pagan lands, like copious 
rain from Heaven. The Church, therefore, 
possesses the mark of holiness. 

There remains the note of authority in 
teaching, which supposes inerrancy, and 
whence follows exclusiveness. For if Christ 
gave to His Church authority to teach, He of 
course authorized it to teach only the truth, 
and truth is by its nature exclusive, it cannot 
tolerate error. The Church of Christ is in- 
tolerant, because it must be infallible. Allow 
me to dwell on this subject ; it is the only re- 
maining point to which I shall call your atten- 
tion to-night. 

The wisdom of God, which " reacheth from 
end to end mightily and disposeth all things 
sweetly," obtaining the greatest results by the 
simplest means, must have established an or- 
der in His Church suited to the wants and 
requirements of man's nature. Now man's 
nature requires an authoritative direction in 
religion. Man acquires knowledge by in- 



The Church, 145 

struction, not by mere reasoning. The igno- 
rance of the mass of men demands that they 
should have a guide in whom often they can 
blindly, but safely, repose. The occupations 
of the wisest of men necessitate them to obey 
some teaching voice in the most important 
matters. The nature of reason in all men ex- 
acts a higher authority than itself alone ; for it 
is weak, limited, and subject to error. A child 
believes on the word of his father, or his teach- 
er — it would be an abuse to ask him to reason 
for himself; yet the Christian child must believe. 
As a social being, man takes in, absorbs, even 
the prejudices of the country in which he lives, 
the society which he frequents, the books, the 
pamphlets and newspapers which he reads. 
Man is dependent on his fellow-man in a 
thousand ways, and particularly for the ac- 
quirement of knowledge : what would we 
know, and what could we do, if we lived each 
one in a state of isolation ? Read the history 
of ancient and of modern, of Asiatic and of 
European nations : how will you find that 



146 The Church, 

philosophy or theology or science has always 
been taught? By teachers in schools. And 
in fact how do we do ourselves ? Do we not 
begin in every study by listening and accept- 
ing? Everything is full of mysteries, even in 
the natural order. No human mind is capa- 
ble, undirected, of grasping all truth in all its 
details. " They are madmen," said Napoleon 
Bonaparte, of the self-sufficient philosophers 
of his day, " who would touch the sky with 
their hands, and ask the moon for a toy." 
We confide — and we would be most imprac- 
tical beings, if we did not — our fortunes, our 
lives, our dearest interests, to a friend, to an 
agent, a servant, a lawyer, a physician, a 
tradesman. Therefore a governing and teach- 
ing Church is conformable to man's nature 
and his wants. Therefore it became God's 
wisdom to establish such a Church. The 
effects of God's action are innumerable, but 
the machinery is simple, not complicated, and 
the laws are few : above all, in His providence, 
the means to the end are effective. What 



The Church. 147 

more simple and efficacious means could He 
choose for making known His religion than 
by giving authority to His Church ? )esus 
Christ could communicate that authoiity to 
His Church. What motive was there to pre- 
vent His doing so? Was it because that it 
would be displeasing to the pride of man ? of 
powerful kings ? or of rebellious peoples ? 
God does not love pride ; but He loves that 
man should obey man, for His sake. " It is 
like the sin of witchcraft," says the Scripture 
(1 Kings, xv. 23), "to rebel; and, like the 
crime of idolatry, to refuse to obey." In the 
family, and in civil society, God insists on sub- 
mission, by the law of nature : why not in the 
religious society ? In barbarous nations, hard- 
ly any limit is placed to the authority of the 
parent over his children. In ancient Rome, 
power of life and death was given, and in 
modern China is still given, to the father ove ' 
his child. In the most civilized nations there 
exists the greatest strength where the bond 
of authority is strongest. Ours is an age of 



148 The Church. 

revolt ; and the consequence is that men are 
asking with alarm, whither are we drifting ? 
to what abyss of confusion ? to what chaos ? 
Was it because man's individual reason re- 
quired no assistance in finding out God's reve- 
lation, that authority was not necessary in the 
Church ? The confusion among those who 
have adopted this principle is the best answer 
to such a question. If the mysteries of the 
natural order are above our power of compre- 
hension, how must it be with God's revela- 
tion, which is nothing else but an imperfect 
manifestation of His own being to our limited 
intelligence ? 

Historically, it is true that religion has thus 
always been taught. So it has always been 
taught in Pagan countries. Even God Him- 
self so taught man. To Adam he made 
known His original revelation, and through 
him to his posterity. He called Noah, and 
taught him, and gave him laws which were to 
be transmitted to his descendants. He then 
called Abraham, and gave him laws. So su- 



The Church. 149 

preme was the religious authority of the pa- 
triarchs, that Isaac did not call in question his 
father's right to immolate him as a victim to 
the Almighty. The Jewish law, revealed 
through Moses, was taught and explained to 
the people by their priests. " Do whatever 
the priest of the Levitical race shall teach 
thee," says the Book of Deuteronomy, (Deut. 
xxiv. 8.) " They (the priests)," says the Pro- 
phet Ezechiel, " shall teach my people the dif- 
ference between holy and profane, and show 
them how to discern between clean and un- 
clean. And when there shall be a controversy, 
they shall stand in my judgments, and shall 
judge." "The lips of the priest," says the 
Prophet Malachias (Mai. iii. 7), " shall keep 
knowledge; and they shall seek the law at 
his mouth; because he is the angel of the 
Lord of hosts." Plato felt the need of some 
such teacher in the world, and exclaimed that 
it was necessary some God should come and 
make known to man the truth. Jesus Christ 
came and taught, and like the self-appointed 



i5o The Church. 

scribes and pharisees, but " as one having au- 
thority/' And He bade His disciples " go and 
teach." " And this gospel of the kingdom," 
He said, " shall be preached in the whole 
world, for a testimony unto all nations ; and 
then the consummation shall come," (Matth. 
xxiv. 14.) We may conclude that He intend- 
ed therefore, that the successors of these apos- 
ties should continue, like them, and like Him- 
self, to preach with " authority" until " the 
consummation shall come." 

This authority was necessary for the sta- 
bility of his Church, for its unity, its Catho- 
licity, and its perpetuity. Jesus Christ came 
to unite all races and classes of men, lords 
and slaves, the learned and the ignorant, 
Greek and barbarian, " there shall be one 
fold " he said, " and one shepherd." There 
will not be a church for the poor and a 
church for the rich, one rule for the wise and 
learned, another for the" ignorant and foolish : 
rather, in the words of the prophet, " the 
wolf shall dwell with the lamb ; and the 



The Chui'ch. i5i 

leopard shall lie down with the kid ; the calf 
and the lion and the sheep shall abide to- 
gether, and a little child shall lead them, (Is. 
xi. 6.) How could they come to this agree- 
ment, and how could this understanding last, 
unless they submitted to some authoritative 
teacher ? 

But this authority in the Church would be 
insufficient, unless accompanied by infalli- 
bility. The Church speaks in the name of 
God : it represents His person who is the 
existing truth, and Who can give no commis- 
sion to teach in His name and to exact be- 
lief, except for the truth. " The law was 
given by Moses," says St, John, " grace and 
truth came by Jesus Christ," (Jn. i. 17.) This 
is what we want, this is what man requires, 
for his peace, and for his safety — the truth. 
For there is question here of our eternity. This 
is the very object of a Church, to teach men 
the truth. A Church which may err cannot 
give us certainty ; and without the assurance 
-of certainty, we cannot be in peace, we shall 



1 52 The Church. 

not consider ourselves safe. Does not St. 
James tell us that " whosoever shall keep the 
whole law, but offend in one point, is become 
guilty of all," (James ii. 10.) Has not the 
Saviour said, " Enter ye in at the narrow gate ; 
for wide is the gate and broad is the way 
that leadeth to destruction, and many there 
are who enter by it. How narrow is the 
gate, and strait is the way which leadeth to 
life ; and few there are who find it! Beware 
of false prophets," (Matth. vii. 13, i5.) And 
does not the apostle bid us to " work out 
our salvation with fear and trembling." Yet 
" God our Saviour will have all men to be 
saved and come to the knowledge of the 
truth," (1 Tim. ii. 4.) It is by the Church 
that God makes known to us the way in 
which we are to be saved. Therefore he 
bids us " hear the Church," treat those who 
will not listen to the Church " as the heathen 
and the publican," " mark those who cause 
dissensions ;" therefore the apostle tells us 
that " without faith, it is impossible to please 



The Church. 153 

God," that " he who cometh to God, must 
believe." But how can we reasonably hear 
and believe and obey the Church, unless we 
be sure that the Church will tell us nothing 
but the truth ? The Church of Christ must 
be holy : an essential part of her holiness 
consists in this, that she cannot deviate 
from the truth, that she is faithful to her 
Spouse. " Bear not the yoke together with 
unbelievers," says St. Paul. " For what par- 
ticipation hath justice with injustice ? or what 
fellowship hath light with darkness ? or what 
concord hath Christ with Belial ? or what 
part hath the faithful with the unbeliever?" 
(2 Cor. vi. 14.) The Church that could teach 
falsehood would cease to be the temple of 
God and become the temple of idols ; it 
would be the enemy of Christ, not His friend. 
We need an infallible Church for the right 
intelligence of the Scriptures. On this point 
we have sufficiently insisted already. Ex- 
perience has shown that neither private judg- 
ment, nor the private spirit, can interpret 



1 54 The Church. 

Scripture consistently. The philosopher 
Locke confessed that he could not understand 
St. Paul. St. Peter had warned us long be- 
fore that St. Paul was " hard to be under- 
stood," and that in his epistles there are 
things " which the unlearned and unstable 
wrest, as also the other Scriptures, to their 
own destruction," (2 Pet. iii. 16.) And, in 
general, he had cautioned us to " understand 
this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture 
is made by private interpretation," (2 Pet. i. 
20.) In fact men have abandoned the hope- 
less task of finding out what they are to be- 
lieve by the private study of the Bible. If 
then God did not will that volume to be a 
sealed book to us, or did not wish that we 
should be forever " carried about like little 
children, tossed to and fro with every wind 
of doctrine," (Eph. iv. 14), "always learning 
and never attaining to the knowledge of the 
truth," (2 Tim. iii. 7.) He must have estab- 
lished in His Church an infallible authority 
which would be to us as assuring and com- 



The Church. i55 

forting a light as the beacon on the rock- 
bound coast to the mariner who is sailing to 
his port amidst the darkness and danger of 
the night. 

The apostles were infallible. This no one 
denies. Who among Christians would have 
doubted or contradicted what St. Paul, or St. 
James, or St. Andrew, might have said ? 
Therefore that infallibility continues. The 
same reasons for its existence hold now as 
held then. Men need as much to be taught 
now as then, to be told the truth now as 
then, to possess religious certitude now as 
then. The constitution of the Church has 
not changed. Ecclesiastical history tells us 
of no revolution effected in it after the death 
of the last Apostle, St. John, nearly a hundred 
years after Christ. Nay, it would have been 
a weakness on the part of Christ, who 
founded a Church for perpetuity, not to have 
founded it on a solid lasting basis from the 
beginning such as it was to continue till the 
end. Infallibility existed in the Synagogue : 



1 56 The Church. 

not uninterruptedly, but yet truly, and in a 
manner suited to the Jewish dispensation. 
The prophets who appeared from time to 
time under the Law, having proved their 
mission from God, either by miracles or by 
the fulfilment of minor prophecies which 
they made, were accredited by the people 
and implicitly believed in the revelations of 
which they were the authors. So Jesus 
Christ Himself proved similarly His mission 
by His miracles and prophecies, and His ful- 
filment of the prophecies concerning Him, 
and consequently deserved to be believed in 
preference to the Jewish priests of His time 
who possessed no infallibility and were un- 
faithful to their trust as guardians of the Law. 
Now the synagogue was the figure, the sha- 
dow, the adumbration, of the Church : what 
was imperfect in the synagogue was to be 
made perfect in the Church, The infallibility 
of the synagogue was interrupted and inter- 
mittent ; the infallibility of the Church must 
be constant and perpetual. 



The Church. \5j 

Finally, the promises of infallibility in 
Scripture are so clear and distinct as hardly 
to admit of tergiversation. " And Jesus com- 
ing, spoke to them, saying : All power is 
given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go ye 
therefore and teach all nations, baptizing 
them in the name of the Father and of the 
Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them 
to observe all things whatsoever I have com- 
manded you ; and behold I am with you all 
days even to the consummation of the world," 
(Matth. xxviii. 18-20.) " He that believeth 
and is baptized, shall be saved ; but he that 
believeth not shall be condemned, " (Mark 
xvi. 16.) " As the Father hath sent me, I 
also send you," (Jn. xx. 21.) " He that 
heareth you, heareth Me ; and he that des- 
piseth you, despiseth Me ; and he that des- 
piseth Me, despiseth Him that sent Me," 
(Luke x. 16.) " We are of God. He that 
knoweth God, heareth us : he that is not of 
God, heareth us not. By this we know the 
spirit of truth, an the spirit of error," (1 Jn. 



1 58 The Church. 

iv. 6.) " If he will not hear the Church, let 
him be to thee as the heathen and the publi- 
can/' (Matth. xviii. 17.) "The Church of 
the living God, the house of God, the pillar 
and ground of the truth," (1 Tim. iii. i5.) 
" Upon this rock I will build my Church, and 
the gates of hell shall not prevail against it," 
(Matth. xvi. 18.) " I will ask the Father, 
and He shall give you another Paraclete, 
that he may abide with you forever, the 
Spirit of truth. . . . He will teach you all 
things, and bring all things to your mind, 
whatsoever I shall have said to you," (Jn. xiv. 
16, 26.) "A glorious Church, not having 
spot or wrinkle, or any such thing, but holy 
and without blemish," (Eph. v. 27.) The 
prophecies of the Old Testament concerning 
the future Christian Church, speak in the 
strongest terms of its infallibility. " In the 
last day," says the prophet Isais, " the moun- 
tain of the house of the Lord shall be pre- 
pared on the top of mountains, and it shall 
be exalted above the hills ; and all nations 



The Church. i5o 

shall flow unto it. And many people shall 
go and say, Come and let us go up to the 
mountain of the Lord, and to the house of 
the God of Jacob, and He will teach us His 
ways, a7id we will walk in His paths" (Jn. ii. 
2, 3.) " We have looked for light, and be- 
hold darkness ; brightness, and we have 
walked in the dark. We have groped for 
the wall ; and, like the blind, we have groped, 
as if we had no eyes : we have stumbled at 
noon-day as in darkness : we are in dark 
places as dead men. And there shall come 
a Redeemer to Sion, and to them that re- 
turn from iniquity in Jacob, saith the Lord. 
This is my covenant with them, saith the 
Lord : My spirit is in thee, and my word, 
that I have put in thy mouth, shall not de- 
part out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth 
of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy 
seed's seed, saith the Lord, from henceforth 
and forever," (Is. 1 ix. 9-21.) " Then shall 
the eyes of the blind be opened ; and the 
ears of. the deaf shall be unstopped. Then 



160 The Church. 

shall the lame leap as a hart ; and the tongue 
of the dumb shall be free. . . . And a path 
and a way shall be there ; and it shall be 
called the holy way : the unclean shall not 
pass over it ; and this shall be unto you a 
straight way, so that fools shall not err there- 
in" (Is. xxxv.) 

The admonitions of the apostles to the first 
Christians not to follow strange teachers and 
to avoid heretics, suppose the existence of in- 
fallibility in the Church. For infallibility 
alone can justify intolerance : the mathemati- 
cian who sees with evidence that the three 
angles of a triangle are equal to two right an- 
gles, is in the simple impossibility of tolerat- 
ing any other opinion ; but the uninstructed 
man who is ignorant how many right angles 
are equivalent to a triangle, admits with indif- 
ference every apparently probable guess on 
the subject. Now the apostles tell us to 
mark those who cause dissensions," to 4t avoid" 
those " reproved as to the faith," not to bid 
them "God speed you," not to " receive them 



The Church, 161 

into the house." " Though an angel from 
heaven," says St. Paul, " preach a gospel to 
you beside that which we have preached to 
you, let him be anathema," (Gal. i. 8.) " Re- 
member your prelates, . . . imitate their faith. 
Jesus Christ yesterday, and to-day, and the 
same forever. Be not carried away with va- 
rious and strange doctrines," (Heb. xiii. 7-9.) 
" One Lord, one faith, one baptism . . . that 
we may not now be little children, tossed to 
and fro, and carried about with every wind of 
doctrine," (Eph. iv.) " Know that in the last 
days shall come . . . men corrupted in mind, 
reprobate as to the faith, always learning and 
never coming to the knowledge of the truth 
.... (who will) resist the truth," (2 Tim. iii.) 
So St. Peter : " There were false prophets 
among the people ; even as there shall be 
lying teachers among you, who shall bring in 
sects of perdition, and deny the Lord who 
bought them, bringing upon themselves swift 
destruction," (2 Pet. ii.) What the Scriptures 
promised, the Fathers believed. " For my 



1 62 The Church. 

part," says St. Augustin, " I would not believe 
the gospel unless the authority of the Catho- 
lic Church moved me to it, (nisi me Catholics 
Ecclesiae commoveret auctoritas.") And St. 
Athanasius seems to have had the same 
thought : " The canons of the holy Catholic 
and Apostolio Church have confirmed to us 
the four gospels." « How can the traveller 
walk in the dark ?" says St. Ambrose, " his 
foot stumbles in the night, unless the moon, 
as it were the eye of the world, point out the 
way. Thou also art in the night of the world. 
Let the Church point out the way to thee." 
' There is a royal way," says St. Epiphamius, 
" which is the Church of God, and the road 
of truth." " Learn from the Church," says St. 
Cyril of Jerusalem, " which are the books of 

the Old and New Testaments Guard that 

faith alone which is now delivered to thee by 
the Church." "The Catholic Church alone 
retains the true worship," says Lactantius ; 
" This is the source of truth, this is the dwell- 
ing of faith." "It is a duty to obey the 



The Church. 163 

priests of the Church," says St. Irenaeus, 
" who hold their succession from the apostles, 
and who, with that succession, received, agree- 
ably to the will of the Father, the sure pledge 
of truth." " Do thou run to the tabernacle 
of God," says St. Augustin again ; " hold fast 
to the Catholic Church ; do not depart from 
the rule of truth, and thou shalt be protected 
in the tabernacle from the contradiction of 
tongues." 

The fact is that even those who have de- 
nied the existence of infallibility, have felt 
themselves obliged to admit it in some form, 
and practically act as though they themselves 
enjoyed its possession. At first, the reform- 
ers denied all infallibility. Then, seeing the 
necessity of adopting some standard of belief 
in order to keep up at least a semblance of 
union among themselves, they declared that 
though all Churches might err on non-funda- 
mental points of the Christian religion, the 
whole Church could not be mistaken in fun- 



1 &A The Church. 

damental points, on account of their being too 
clearly expressed in Scripture. Now here 
was an admission of infallibility ; and, at the 
same time, a contradiction of their original doc- 
trine, which is a sure sign of error. But it 
did not help them much ; for they continued 
to differ and divide among themselves, on 
such fundamental points as the divinity of 
Jesus Christ, the existence of three persons in 
God, the real presence of Christ in the Sacra- 
ment, the necessity of baptism, the eternity 
of hell, etc. Meanwhile, every Protestant 
father of a family has acted as though his 
Church were infallible ; he has taught his chil- 
dren what they were to believe, he has led 
them to his place of worship, and (which 
shows at least that he thought he was infalli- 
bly sure that that was wrong), if any one of 
these children, following the Protestant rule 
of judging and choosing for himself, determin- 
ed to re-enter the old Catholic Church from 
which his fathers had gone out, he has shown 



The Church. i65 

any thing but pleasure at the fact. Protes- 
tants, as well as Catholics, have been intoler- 
ant and persecuted. They have excommuni- 
cated and anathematized ; and if, at the pre- 
sent day, a more liberal spirit is gaining 
ground, it is due, partly no doubt to a change 
of manners, but partly also to the fact that, 
while the Catholic Church is making herself 
better known by the vigorous life which is 
within her, outside the Church religious zeal 
has been spent and is dead, and in its place 
there is rising up a rank vegetation of indif- 
ference and infidelity. So long as the reli- 
gious principle and the fear of God is strong 
in a person educated in any Protestant sect, 
that person, though he knows them to lay 
claim to no inerrancy, will fear even to doubt 
the word of the ministers of his sect, lest he 
should go astray ; such is the strength of that 
instinct of our nature which tells us that we 
must depend on authority to know the way 
to salvation. In fact, no cause acts more 
powerfully to prevent wavering souls, too 



1 66 The Churcn. 

timid to follow their own conviction and act 
on the Protestant principle of judging for 
one's self, from entering the true fold of 
Christ, than the authority of those to whom 
they naturally adhere from being accustomed 
to look up to them as teachers. 

Nevertheless the Roman Catholic Church 
alone openly lays claim to the enjoyment of 
this privilege of infallibility. This very claim 
itself ought to secure for her the sympathy 
of every earnest religious soul. For the ex- 
istence of infallibility in the Church is a de- 
sideratum of the human heart. We all wish 
to know the truth. Especially where there 
is question of our eternal salvation, we wish 
to be able to rest, to repose in peace ; and 
that we cannot do, but in the assured posses- 
sion of the knowledge of the truth ; not in 
doubt, not in inquiry, not in probability, not 
in opinion. Has God appointed one particu- 
lar way in which I am to save my soul ? and 
is it in my power to find that one only true 
sure way ? and am I obliged to seek for it, 



The Church. 167 

and walk by it ? * I am a sinner : have my 
sins been forgiven me ? how am I to assure 
myself that my sins will be forgiven me ? 
Has God appointed somewhere certain 
particular means by which He will com- 
municate to me strength to persevere in His 
service, to keep His law, and finally reach 
heaven ? am I obliged to make use of these 
means ? Here are questions which the soul 
naturally puts to itself, and to which it de- 
sires to know the true answer. Except 
where our will is perverted by passion or 
prejudice or some earthly interest, we always 
desire to know as much truth as we can. If 
an angel from heaven would come and re- 
veal to us all about the solar system, or the 
mysteries of geology, or the true history of 
past times, or the art of making money, we 
would rejoice and clap our hands. But es- 
pecially in this matter ought we to pray for 
some one to appear to us who will tell us 
categorically and peremptorily the truth. 
For it will not suffice to say : God will not 



t68 The Church. 

condemn me for serving Him in any good 
enough way. You are not sure of that ; you 
may be mistaken ; therefore you cannot be in 
peace. It will not do to be told you have 
the Bible ; you do not know what to believe 
in the Bible, or if you are to believe all that is 
in the Bible ! you do not understand it all, 
and you do not know how far you are 
obliged to understand it, unless the Church 
tells you ; you may say, I am an ignorant 
man, who has not much time for study, I am 
not wiser than the eunuch of the Queen of 
Ethiopia, who declared, " How can I under- 
stand, unless some one show me ? " 

These questions of the soul require a posi- 
tive answer, in order that it may be a satisfac- 
tory one. None but an infallible Church can 
give such an answer. Therefore none but an 
infallible Church can satisfy the wants of the 
human heart as well as of the human mind. 
Therefore such a Church is worthy of the 
conception of God. For God is good, He is 
one, He is true. He is a God of union, of 



The Church. 169 

order, of beauty, of strength. His goodness 
and His wisdom would not allow Him to 
leave His creature man in a horrid state of 
doubt. His wisdom and His power would 
lead Him to give to man the efficacious 
means for avoiding error. His dignity and 
majesty require that, if He make a revela- 
tion, He should also have it published and 
known, and insist on its being received and 
believed in every point and jot, and tittle ; 
therefore that He should appoint an authority 
to expound it with inerrancy, and that His 
providence should watch over this authority, 
so as to secure its continuing to ever faith- 
fully discharge its function. 

This is what the Catholic Church under- 
stands by infallibility : in the words of an 
eminent Catholic American, "simply pro- 
tection against forgetting, misunderstanding, 
or misstating." We do not say that the 
Church is inspired when she speaks — though 
we believe that the Spirit of God watches 
over and directs her. All the heads of the 



170 The Church. 

Church, not only individually, but even col- 
lectively, could, absolutely speaking, be mis- 
taken, did not God protect them from error. 
But we believe, in virtue of the promise of 
Christ to His disciples, that when the heads, 
that is, the bishops of the Church, in union 
with the Supreme Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ, 
on earth, do solemnly declare that such a 
doctrine is and has always been the belief of 
the Church, and is contained in the deposit 
of revelation confided by Christ to His 
apostles — we believe, that true as the word 
of God, they cannot be mistaken ; that God 
will not let them, even if they wished it, 
speak in contradiction to the truth. Until 
the Church has thus spoken by the voice of 
her pastors, Catholics are at liberty to dis- 
cuss unsettled points. Since the apostles 
did not write out in detail all the articles of 
the Christian religion, it is clear that many 
doubts will arise in the minds of the faithful 
as to whether such or such a matter be con- 
tained in the revelation, some affirming, 



The Church. 171 

others denying. But we have a tribunal to 
which we can appeal ; and when the Church 
has spoken, all submit to her decision : if 
any do nqt, they cease to be Catholics. The 
Church does not then make a new revela- 
tion : she simply declares what has always 
been the revelation ; what may have been 
obscured in the minds of some of her chil- 
dren ; but which God would never allow her 
to define unless she had received it handed 
down from the Fathers of the faith. Thus, 
until the Council of the Vatican, the opinion 
was not yet condemned of those who believed 
that the Pope was infallible only when his 
declarations had been approved by the bishops 
of the Church. I am not going to enter into 
the question of papal infallibility. Every 
Roman Catholic now believes that the infalli- 
bility of the Church resides in the person of 
the successor of St. Peter : not, as I have 
said, in the sense that he can invent new 
dogmas, or, as it were, act separatedly from 
the Church ; but because her faith will al- 



172 The Church. 

ways be the same as his faith, and he, in his 
quality of head, will never, by God's protec- 
tion, fail to proclaim exactly and opportunely 
the revealed truth in which the body of the 
Church has always believed. 

But I would call your attention to two 
facts in connection with this discussion. The 
first is this : though the opposition to the 
definition of this dogma in the Council was 
great and vehement, still not one of the 900 
bishops of the Roman Catholic Church has 
refused his submission to the decision so- 
lemnly pronounced in Rome on the 18th of 
last July. The second fact is, that it was 
found impossible to produce one instance in 
which the See of Peter had deflected from 
the faith. The case of Pope Honorius was 
the only one which offered some plausible 
grounds for argument ; and how little could 
be made out of that case was shown from the 
fact, that in the document in which Honorius 
was supposed to have taught error, he gave 
no doctrinal decision, that the document it- 



The Church. 173 

self was in all probability a forgery of his 
enemies, and that this Pope, in other writings, 
had declared the true Christian belief. 

In the Catholic Church, therefore, the Ro- 
' man Church claims infallibility, and she has 
vindicated her claim, when called to undergo 
the strictest examination of her history. 
" Happy Church !" we can exclaim to it with 
Tertullian, " which the great apostles fully 
impregnated at the same time with their 
blood and w r ith all their doctrine !" But the 
position of the Church of Rome in the Church 
Catholic, will be the subject of our next 
lecture. 



LECTURE V. 

The Pope. 

The Catholic Church alone possesses those 
qualities which were appointed by Jesus 
Christ to be the distinctive marks of His true 
Church. But which is the Catholic Church ? 
Do not all Christian churches belong to, and 
form part of, the Church Catholic ? Is not 
the Greek Church a portion of the Catholic 
Church ? And are there not persons in the 
Anglican body, and in its sister-communion, 
the Protestant Episcopal Church of America, 
who call themselves Catholic ? Or is the Ca- 
tholic Church composed only and exclusively, 
as I am assuming in these lectures, of those 
churches which are in active communion with 
the See of Rome ? Is the Roman Catholic 
Church the Catholic Church? 

The answer to this question will furnish us 



The Pope. 175 

with another, still more distinct, sign, by 
which we can recognize where the Christian 
Church really is ? It is clear that if the well- 
known pretension of the bishops of the 
Church of Rome to govern the universal 
Church be invalid, all the churches which ad- 
mit it would be in error, and could no longer 
claim that inerrancy of which we have spoken 
as an attribute of the true Church of Christ. 
Let us then examine this question : Is actual 
communion with, and subordination to, the 
See of Rome, a necessary condition for be- 
longing to the Church ? or, in other words, 
did Christ give to St. Peter and his successors 
in the episcopal seat, a supremacy of jurisdic- 
tion over his whole Church ? 

That the twelve Apostles possessed su- 
preme authority in the Church is admitted by 
all to follow from certain texts of Scripture. 
The Church, according to St. Paul (Eph. ii. 
19-22), was " built upon the foundation of the 
apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself 
being: the chief corner-stone." And 1 Cor. 



& 



* 76 The Pope. 

xii. 27, 28, " And God indeed hath set some in ' 
the Church, first apostles,, secondly, etc." In 
the Apocalypse (xxi. 14), « And the wall of 
the city had twelve foundations ; and in them 
the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the 
lamb." Matth. xxviii. 18, 19: "All power is 
given to me ... go ye therefore and teach all 
nations." Now, according to the argument 
of Origen, if what is attributed to the twelve 
in general, is said in a special and singular 
manner of one, then it belongs in a superior 
and excellent manner to that one. We have 
therefore to inquire whether what was accord- 
ed to the apostles collectively, has been grant- 
ed in a separate and distinct form to St. 
Peter. 

But before examining the passages wherein 
Christ appears to confer on St. Peter an au- 
thority superior to that of the other apostles, 
let us consider whether scriptural analogy 
would lead to suppose that he would select 
one person to be the chief ruler of His Church. 
The old law, according to St. Paul, (Heb. vii. 



The Pope. T yy 

19,) " brought nothing to perfection, but" was . 
" an introduction of a better hope, by which 
we approach to God ... a better .testament 
which is established on better promises," (viii. 
6.) That is, the old law was the type, the 
figure, the shadow of the new. The new was 
to be the complement and perfection of the 
old. Whatever imperfection we find, there- 
fore, in the old law, we need not expect it to 
exist in the new ; whatever perfection we find 
in the old law, we must expect to see existing 
in a still more perfect state in the new. Now 
Moses, the law-giver of the Jews, the image 
of Christ, enjoyed both spiritual and temporal 
supremacy over the people. " Upon the chair 
of Moses," says our Lord, " have sitten the 
scribes and pharisees ; all therefore whatso- 
ever they shall say unto you, observe and do 
it," (Matth. xxiii. 2.) " Moses and Aaron 
among His priests," says the Psalm xcix. 
After Moses, the spiritual and the temporal 
power were separated, by Moses' own ap- 
pointment, in accordance with the Divine will. 






178 The Pope, 

To Joshua he gave one part of his authority, 
the temporal ; " Take Joshua," says God to 
him, in the Book of Numbers, " the son of 
Nun, and put thy hand upon him, and he shall 
stand before Eleazar, the priest, and all the 
multitude ; and thou shalt give him part of thy 
glory," (Num. xxvii. 18, etc.) But the spirit- 
ual portion of his authority, all vested in Elea- 
zar, the son of Aaron, the brother of Moses, 
and was from him to descend, in lineal suc- 
cession, to the first born of his children. Now 
Moses and Aaron were of the tribe of Levi. 
So that the high-priesthood, the spiritual su- 
premacy in Israel, was limited to one line in 
one family of one tribe, and deposited in the 
person of one man till the end of the Law. 
In the place I have quoted from, the Lord 
continues to Moses : " If anything be to be 
done, Eleazar the priest shall consult the Lord 
for (Joshua). He, and all the children of 
Israel with him, and the rest of the multitude, 
shall go out and go in at his word," (Num. 
xxvii. 21.) And, in the third chapter of the 



The Pope. 179 

Book of Numbers, Eleazar is called " the 
prince of the princes of the Levites, Eleazar, 
the son of Aaron the priest," (v. 32.) In the 
second Book of Paralipomenon, or Chronicles, 
this distinction of supreme spiritual and su- 
preme temporal authority is again clearly spe- 
cified : " And Ananias the priest, your high- 
priest, shall be chief in the things which re- 
gard God ; and Zabadias, the son of Ismahel, 
who is ruler in the house of Juda, shall be 
over those matters which belong to the king's 
office," (2 Paral. or Chron. xix. 11.) The 
Jews therefore had one temporal ruler, judge 
or king (God seems to have cared little 
which), and one supreme spiritual ruler, the 
high-priest. Now Christ, of whom Moses 
was the figure, had " all power in heaven and 
on earth." That He should have left to tem- 
poral rulers their authority, but that He 
should have appointed one supreme spiritual 
ruler in His Church, as the thing about which 
He cared the most, is what we are led to ex- 
pect from analogy with the inspired conduct 



1 80 The Pope. 

of Moses. For this unity of spiritual head 
and government in the synagogue was a per- 
fection, not a defect, and consequently was to 
be preserved in the Church of which the syn- 
agogue was the first rough draft. That it is 
a perfection, is clear from the fact that all 
mankind have always considered it such, as is 
attested by the conduct of all nations in choos- 
ing to have one ruler, king, emperor or pre- 
sident : no army has ever yet fought well 
under two generals, and it never yet has been 
heard of that one ship had two captains ; the 
necessity of electing one chief has induced 
even pirates, the most lawless of men, to sub- 
ject themselves to a despotic ruler, as neces- 
sary both for their existence and for their 
success. 

The first remarkable thing we find about St. 
Peter in Scripture, is his prominence among the 
disciples of our Lord. St. Matth. (ch. x.), gives 
a list of the apostles : " And the names of the 
twelve apostles are these : The first Simon, 
who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, 



The Pope, 1 8 1 

etc." In age and in vocation to the apostle- 
ship Andrew was the first ; why then is Peter 
called the first? St. Mark, (ch. iii.,j) and St. 
Luke, (ch. vi.,) give us also a catalogue of the 
names of the apostles, both beginning also 
with Peter, and, like St. Matthew, naming last 
the traitor Judas, while the names of the other 
apostles are related in indifferent order. And 
everywhere else, and in everything else, Peter 
is always first, not only by his own prompti- 
tude and the favor of his Master during his 
Master's life, but, what is to be remarked, 
after his Master's death. He is the first to 
propose the election of another apostle, to 
preach the Gospel in Jerusalem, to speak be- 
fore the Sanhedrim, to condemn Ananias and 
Saphira, to preach to the Gentiles in the per- 
son of Cornelius, the first to visit all the 
Churches (Acts, ix. 32), — to see him Paul 
goes to Jerusalem ; it is he who opens the 
Council of Jerusalem, and proposes the subject 
of deliberation. So he had been the first 
among the disciples to profess faith in the di- 



1 82 The Pope. 

vinity of Jesus Christ, the first to see Him 
risen from the dead, first in the obligation im- 
posed to exercise divine charity. This con- 
stantly obtrusive priority of Peter is so strik- 
ing as to oblige Barrow, an Anglican writer 
against the Papacy, to speak of it in the fol- 
lowing terms: "It is indeed observable that 
upon all occasions our Lord signified a parti- 
cular respect to him, before the rest of his col- 
leagues ; for to him more frequently than to 
any of them, He directed His discourse ; unto 
him, by a kind of anticipation, He granted or 
promised those gifts and privileges which He 
meant to confer on them all ; him He did as- 
sume as spectator and witness of His glorious 
transfiguration ; him He picked out as com- 
panion and attendant on Him in His grievous 
agony ; his feet He first washed ; to him He 
did first discover Himself after His resurrec- 
tion (as Paul implieth), and with him then He 
did entertain most discourse, in especial man- 
ner recommending to him the pastoral care 
of the Church ; by which manner of proceed- 



The Pope. i%<, 

ing our Lord may seem to have constituted 
St. Peter the first in order among the apos- 
tles, or sufficiently to have hinted His mind 
for their direction, admonishing them by His 
example to render unto him a special defer- 
ence." St. Francis of Sales is more eloquent 
on the same subject : " Is the Church likened 
to a house?" says he; '-'"It is placed on the 
foundation of a rock, which is Peter. Will 
you represent it under the form of a family ? 
You behold our Redeemer paying the tribute 
as its Master, and after Him comes Peter as 
His representative." — He alludes to the pas- 
sage in St. Matthew (Matth. xvii. 26), where 
St. Peter is told to take up a fish, " and when 
thou hast opened its mouth thou shalt find a 
piece of money ; that take and give unto 
them for Me and thee/ 1 which excited the 
jealousy of the other apostles, for the evan- 
gelist tells us immediately afterwards that "at 
that hour, they came unto Jesus saying : Who 
is the greatest -in the kingdom of heaven?" 
— To continue with St. Francis : ." Is the 



1 84 The Pope. 

Church a bark ? Peter is its pilot, and it is 
our Redeemer who instructs him. Is the 
doctrine by which we are drawn from the 
gulf of sin represented by a fisher's net ? It 
is Peter who casts it ; it is Peter who draws 
it ; the other disciples lend their aid ; but it is 
Peter who presents the fishes to our Re- 
deemer. Is the Church represented by an 
embassy? St. Peter is at its head. Do you 
prefer the figure of a kingdom ? St. Peter 
carries its keys. In fine, will you have it 
shadowed under the symbol of a flock and a 
fold ? St. Peter is the shepherd and universal 
pastor under Jesus Christ. ,, All this is very 
remarkable indeed. And wherever there is 
question of the disciples together, St. Peter is 
mentioned in a peculiar manner : " Peter and 
they that were with him," — " Simon and they 
that were with him," — " Peter standing up 
with the eleven," — " Tell the disciples and 
Peter." 

But, strange as all these passages might be 
as corroboratory proof, since the Spirit of 



The Pope. \ 85 

God, which does nothing without a worthy 
motive, could not inspire the sacred writers to 
insist so much on such a point but for some 
deep meaning,— is there no direct narration 
in Scripture of the transmission by the found- 
er of the Christian religion of supreme Spirit- 
ual authority in His Church to the Apostle 
St. Peter ? It is hardly probable that some- 
thing so important should have been passed 
over by the four historians of the life of Christ. 
Nor has it. We have in those sacred biogra- 
phies, first, a promise of that transmission ; 
secondly, a reminder of that promise ; and 
thirdly, the execution of the promise. 

In the sixteenth chapter of St. Matthew, 
verse the thirteenth, Jesus, coming to the 
neighborhood of Casarea-Philippi, " asked 
His disciples, saying: Whom do men say 
that the Son of Man is? And they said: 
Some John the Baptist, and some Elias, and 
others Jeremias, or one of the prophets. Jesus 
saith to them : But whom do you say that I 
am ? Simon Peter answered, and said : Thou 



1 86 The Pope. 

art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And 
Jesus answering, said to him : Blessed art 
thou, Simon Bar-Jona : because flesh and 
blood have not revealed it to thee, but My 
Father who is in heaven. And I say to thee : 
Thou art Peter (a rock) ; and upon this rock 
I will build My Church, and the gates of hell 
shall not prevail against it. And I will give 
to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. 
And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, 
it shall be bound also in heaven ; and what- 
soever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be 
loosed also in heaven." These remarkable 
and strangely energetical expressions of Jesus 
Christ must have some meaning, and, accord- 
ing to a primary canon of sound criticism, 
they must be taken in their obvious natural 
common sense meaning, if that be possible, 
as we must give both Christ and St. Matthew, 
his historian, credit for good sense. " In our 
life," says St. Bernard, " we seem to do 
many things by chance or by necessity. But 
Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of 



The Pope. jgy 

God, could not be subject to necessity or act 
by chance {i.e. without an object). For what 
necessity can force the power of 1 God? Or 
what can the wisdom of God do by chance ? 
Therefore whatever He did, whatever He said, 
whatever He suffered, we must believe it to 
have been full of deep mysteries, with an in- 
tent of our salvation.'' But ought we not 
precisely to give to these words some deep 
mysterious signification different from the li- 
teral one ? Can we suppose that Christ really 
meant to say that Peter was the rock on which 
He built His Church, that He gave to him the 
keys of the kingdom of heaven, that whatso- 
ever he bound would be bound in heaven, 
and whatsoever he unloosed would be un- 
loosed in heaven ? How could such power 
be given to man ? Is not Christ himself the 
chief corner-stone, and has not the Scripture 
said that " no man can lay another foundation 
but that which is laid — which is Christ Jesus, " 
(i Cor. iii. 9,) as " there is no other name under 
heaven given to men whereby we must be 



1 88 The Pope. 

saved?" (Acts, iii. 12.) As to the impossi- 
bility of conferring such power on man, that 
was the difficulty made by the Jews against 
Christ himself; How can a man have power 
to forgive sins ? St. Bernard has said, in 
answer : " What necessity can force the power 
of God ? or what can the wisdom of God do 
by chance ?" What can be impossible to God 
which His wisdom judges a suitable means 
to some end worthy of Himself? It cannot 
therefore be said that it was impossible for 
Christ to confer this power on St. Peter. St. 
Leo (who flourished in the fifth century) re- 
solves for us the objection drawn from the 
apparent contradiction of establishing the 
Church on another foundation besides Christ. 
" As my Father," he says, explaining the words 
of Jesus, " has manifested my Divinity to 
thee, I make known to thee thy excellence: 
for thou art Peter, that is, as I am the invisi- 
ble rock, the corner-stone, who make both 
one, I the foundation, beside which no m n 
can lay another, — nevertheless thou also art a 



The Pope. 189 

rock, because thou art strengthened by my 
power, so that those things which belong to 
me by nature are common to thee with me 
by participation," Christ therefore remains in- 
deed " the chief corner-stone," but Peter also, 
by the communication of His virtue, is made 
a secondary stone, on which the Church is 
likewise to be built. It was in this secondary 
sense that the Apostles also were called the 
foundation of the Church. (Eph, ii.) 

We must remember that Christ was the 
Word of God, for which to speak is to do, 
which out of nothing created the world. " Let 
there be light," said God, "and there was 
light." So if Christ promises to Peter the 
stability of a rock, we may be sure that in 
Peter will be produced the stability of a rock. 
And it will be a perpetual stability ; for as 
Christ's Church is to be perpetual, it must rest 
on a perpetual foundation. This perpetuity 
is to be found in the line of St. Peter's succes- 
sors in the See of Rome. In that city St. Peter 
lived and governed for a quarter of a century 



190 The Pope. 

and died ; " unless an Angel from heaven 
came down to reveal to us the contrary," says 
Bossuet, " it is patent that his successor in 
that See and no other is the inheritor of his 
authority over the whole Church." No other 
Apostle left a permanent line of successors 
after him ; whereas the early Fathers con- 
stantly appealed to the list of Bishops in Rome, 
from Peter down to their own time, in proof 
of the unity and apostolicity of the Church. 
" As it would be tedious to enumerate the 
whole list of successors," says St. Irenaeus, a 
bishop of the second century, " I shall confine 
myself to that of Rome, the greatest and 
most ancient, and most illustrious Church, 
founded by the glorious Apostles Peter and 
Paul, receiving from them her doctrine which 
was announced to all men, and which, through 
the succession of her Bishops is come down to 
us. To this Church, on account of its supe- 
rior headship, every other must have recourse, 
that is, the faithful of all countries ; in which 
Church has been preserved the doctrine de- 



The Pope. 1 9 1 

livered by the Apostles. They therefore, 
having founded and instructed this Church, 
committed the administration thereof to Li- 
nus. To him succeeded Anacletus ; then, in 
the third place, Clement, who had himself seen 
and conversed with those Apostles. To Cle- 
ment succeeded Evaristus ; to him Alexander ; 
and then, the sixth from the Apostles, Sixtus, 
who was followed by Telesphorus, Hyginus, 
Pius and Anicetus. But Soter having suc- 
ceeded Anicetus, Eleutherius, the twelfth from 
the Apostles, now governs the Church. By 
such regular succession has the doctrine de- 
livered by the Apostles descended to us ; and 
the proof is most clear that it is one and the 
same vivifying faith, which, coming from the 
Apostles, is at this time maintained and 
taught." "In the Catholic Church," says St. 
Augustin, two centuries later, " many are the 
considerations which keep me in her bosom ; 
the assent of nations ; her authority first 
established by miracles ; the succession of 
pastors from the chair of Peter, to whom the 



192 The Pope. 

Lord committed the care of feeding his flock, 
down to the present Bishop ; lastly, the name 
itself of Catholic. These so many and so great 
ties bind the believing man to the Catholic 
Church. ... If we come to the succession 
of Bishops, how much safer is it to adhere to 
that which we can trace to the Apostle St. 
Peter? For to Peter succeeded Linus; to 
Linus, Clement ; to Clement, Anacletus, etc. ; 
and," naming the last, "to Siricius Anastasius." 
And to-day we could say : to Anastasius, 
Pius ; and to Pius, Leo ; and to Leo, Pius 
again ; and to Pius, Gregory ; and to the 
sixteenth Gregory succeeded Pius IX., who 
is the 2 58th pope from St. Peter. 

Listen to the manner in which the eloquent 
Bossuet, in his sermon on the Unity of the 
Church, comments on this promise made to 
St. Peter : — " ' He called his disciples,' says 
the Gospel ; here are all : ' and among them 
he chose twelve.' This is a first separation, 
when the Apostles are chosen. ' And these 
are the names of the twelve Apostles: the 



The Pope. 193 

first Simon, who is called Peter.' Here is a 
second separation ; St. Peter is set at the 
head of the Church, and called for that reason 
by the name of Peter, ' which Jesus Christ,' 
says St. Mark, ' had given him,' in order to 
prepare, as you will see, the work which he 
had in mind to accomplish, namely, to raise 
•all his building on that stone .... To dispose 
him for this honor, Jesus Christ, who knows 
that faith in Himself is the foundation of his 
Church, inspires him with a faith worthy to be 
the basis of that admirable building. ' Thou 
art the Christ, the Son of the living God.' By 
this bold declaration of faith, he draws to 
himself the inviolable promise which makes 
him the foundation of the Church. The word 
of Jesus Christ, who out of nothing makes 
what pleases him, gives this strength to a 
mortal. He marks out Peter personally, and 
by the new name which he gives him. It is 
one who speaks to one : Jesus Christ, the Son 
of God, to Simon, son of Jonas ; Jesus Christ, 
who is the true stone, strong of Himself, to 



194 The Pope. 

Simon who is only the stone by the strength 
which Jesus Christ imparts to him. It is to 
him that Jesus Christ speaks, and in speaking 
acts on him, and stamps on him His own im- 
movableness. 'And 1/ he says, ' say unto 
thee, Thou art Peter, (a rock) ; and,' he adds, 
' upon this rock I will build My Church ; and/ 
he concludes, 'the gates of hell shall not pre- 
vail against it.' .... Say not, think not, that 
this ministry of Peter terminates with him ; 
that which is to serve for support to an eternal 
Church can never have an end. Peter will 
live in his successors. Peter will always speak 
in his chair. This is what the Fathers say. 
This is what six hundred and fifty bishops at 
the Council of Chalcedon confirm. . . . After 
having said to Peter, the eternal preacher of 
the faith, * Thou art Peter, and upon this rock 
I will build my Church,' he adds : ' And I will 
give to thee the keys of the kingdom of 
heaven/ Thou who hast the prerogative of 
preaching the faith, thou shalt have likewise 
the keys which mark the authority of gov- 



The Pope. 195 

ernment. < What thou shalt bind orr earth, 
shall, be bound in heaven ; and what thou 
shalt loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven/ 
All are subjected to these keys y all, my bre- 
thren, kings and nations, pastors and flocks ; 
we declare it with joy, for we love unity, and 
hold obedience to be our glory." The keys 
have always been a symbol of authority ; in 
old times, when rulers entered a city, they 
were presented with the keys of the place. 
" I will lay the key of the house of David 
upon his shoulders," says the prophet Isaias 
of Eliacim who was a figure of Christ (Is. xxii. 
22) ; " he shall open and none shall shut, and 
he shall shut and none shall open." " These 
things saith the Holy One and the True One, 
who hath the key of David," writes the author 
of the Apocalypse, or book of Revelations 
(Apoc. iii. 7) ; " he that openeth and no man 
shutteth, shutteth and no man openeth." 
1 And Peter' continues Bossuet, quoting St. 
Augustin, " ' who in the honor of his primacy 
represented the whole church,' receives also 



1 96 The Pope. 

the first, and the only one at first, the keys 
which should afterwards be communicated to 
all the rest ; in order that we may learn, ac- 
cording to the doctrine of a holy bishop of 
the church of Gaul, that the ecclesiastical au- 
thority, first established in the person of one 
alone, has only been diffused on the condition 
of being always brought back to the principle 
of its unity, and that all those who shall have 
to exercise it ought to hold themselves insep- 
arably united to the same chair. This is that 
Roman Chair so celebrated by the Fathers, 
which they have vied with each other in ex- 
alting as ' the chieftainship of the Apostolic 
See ;' ' the superior chiefship ;' ' the source of 
unity ;' ' that most holy throne which has the 
headship over all the churches of the world ;' 
the head of the Episcopate, the chiefship of 
the universal Church ;' ' the head of the pas- 
toral honor to the world ;' 4 the head of the 
members ;' ' the single chair in which all keep 
unity/ In these words you hear St. Optatus, 
St. Augustin, St. Cyprian, St. Irenaeus, St. 



The Pope. 197 

Prosper, St. Avitus, St. Theodoret, the Council 
of Chalcedon, and the rest ; Africa, Gaul, 
Greece, Asia, the East and the West toge- 
ther." 

These extracts will suffice, I believe, to 
show that the words in the sixteenth chap- 
ter of St. Matthew, addressed by our Lord 
to St. Peter, 'Thou art Peter, and on this 
rock I will build my church, and the gates of 
hell shall not prevail against it ; and I will 
give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, M 
— have always been understood by the 
Fathers of the Church to signify what they 
literally implied, namely : a promise of su- 
preme spiritual jurisdiction over all Christians. 

This promise Christ afterwards renewed 
on a most solemn occasion. On the eve 
of His passion, on that night in which He 
delivered Himself up, the Lord warned His 
disciples of the danger there would be for 
them of being- scandalized in Him, of the 
efforts which Satan was about to make 
to destroy in their hearts that faith, without 



198 The Pope. 

which, he knew, " it is impossible to please 
God." " And the Lord said," turning to 
Peter: " Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath 
desired to have you (all), that he may sift 
you (speaking in the plural number) as 
wheat ; but I have prayed for thee (speaking 
in the singular number), that thy faith fail 
net ; and thou, when thou art converted, con- 
firm thy brethren," — or perhaps more liter- 
ally, " applying thyself to it, confirm thy 
brethren." This grace of stability in faith 
(though Peter fell grievously in moral con- 
duct), during the scandal of the passion, the 
Fathers have understood to have been grant- 
ed to him in virtue of the promise of supreme 
spiritual power in the Church, and to contain 
a confirmation of that promise, as the last 
words imply, " confirm thy brethren." As 
priests and as bishops, Peter and the other 
apostles were equal ; they were " brethren " 
in the sacerdotal and episcopal order and sa- 
crament. But, while the other successors of 
the apostles are bishops, each in his own 



The Pope. 199 

diocess, the successor of St. Peter enjoys un- 
limited jurisdiction over the whole Church, 
and his duty is to " confirm " his brethren, 
even in the Episcopacy, when they have need 
of being confirmed and strengthened. 

Finally, our Saviour accomplished His pro- 
mise by the donation of supreme authority in 
the Church to St. Peter ; which is also nar- 
rated in Scripture. In the last chapter of the 
Gospel of St. John, we are told that several 
of the disciples after the resurrection, on the 
invitation of Peter, having gone to fish, in the 
morning Christ appeared to them on the 
beach, and after they had partaken of a meal 
He had prepardd for them, He thus addressed 
Himself to Simon Peter : " Simon, son of 
John, lovest thou Me more than these ? He 
saith to Him : Yea, Lord, Thou knowest that 
I love Thee. He saith to him : Feed My 
lambs. He saith to him again : Simon, son 
of John, lovest thou Me. He saith to Him : 
Yea, Lord, Thou knowest that I love Thee. 
He saith to him : Feed My lambs. He said 



200 The Pope. 

to him the third time : Simon, son of John, 
lovest thou Me ? Peter was grieved because 
He had said to him the third time, Lovest 
thou Me ? And he said to Him : Lord, thou 
knowest all things : thou knowest that I love 
Thee. He said to him : Feed My sheep," 
(Jn. xxi. 1 5,) Now, besides the difficulty of 
finding any sensible interpretation of this 
thrice repeated injunction, except that of 
governing His spiritual flock, the word in the 
original Greek used here to signify feed, was 
also employed to mean govern as a king, lead, 
direct, instruct. And the substitution of the 
word sheep instead of lambs, in the third in- 
stance, shows that Christ intended to speak 
of His whole flock, the old as well as the 
young, the great in dignity as well as the 
little ones, of all without exception. " You 
are he," writes St. Bernard to Pope Eu- 
genius, " to whom the keys were given, to 
whom the sheep were entrusted. There are 
indeed likewise other gate-keepers of heaven 
and pastors of the flocks ; but you have in- 



The Pope. 201 

herited both titles in a sense far different and 
more sublime. They have each of them 
their respective flocks, severally assigned to 
them : all have been entrusted to you, one 
flock to one man. Nor are you the shep- 
herd of the sheep alone, but of the shepherds 
also ; the one pastor of all. Do you ask me 
how I prove this ? From the word of the 
Lord. For to which I do not say of the 
bishops, but of the apostles themselves, were 
all the sheep committed so absolutely and 
unreservedly ? If thou lovest Me, Peter, 
feed My sheep ?' What sheep ? The peo- 
ple of this or that district, city or kingdom ? 
1 My sheep,' He says. Who does not mani- 
festly see that He did not designate any, but 
assigned them all to him ? None are ex- 
cepted where no distinction is made. The 
other disciples were perchance present when, 
entrusting all to one, he recommended unity 
to all, in one flock and one shepherd, accord- 
ing to the passage : ' My dove is one, my 
beautiful one, my perfect one.' ' We have 



202 The Fope. 

therefore, besides the promise of Christ, and 
the renewal of that promise, a clear narration 
in St. John of the communication by Christ 
to His Apostle St. Peter, of supreme spiritual 
jurisdiction over all the members of His 
Church. 

What, it may be asked here — and the 
question is an important one, which will help 
to elucidate this whole matter — what was the 
reason why Jesus Christ chose to appoint one 
supreme head to His Church ? The reason 
was that assigned by St. Bernard — -to pre- 
serve its unity, " to keep the unity of the 
Spirit in the bond of peace," (Eph. iv. 3.) 
The bond which preserves the members of 
any society, of no matter what kind, in peace- 
ful union, is some central authority, without 
which they would be only — to use an old 
comparison — like a loose bundle of sticks ; 
and to what else the multitudinous, disparate 
Protestant sects can be better compared, 
without uncharitableness, I really do not 



The Pope. 203 

know ; they have nothing to bind them to- 
gether. On the contrary, that the See of St. 
Peter was the centre of Catholic unity, by 
which that unity was always to be main- 
tained, has been the constant teaching of the 
Fathers. " Irenaeus rather vaguely," says 
Hallam, i( and Cyprian more positively, admit, 
or rather assert, the supremacy of the Church 
of Rome, which the latter seems to have re- 
garded as a kind of centre of Catholic unity." 
St. Irenaeus' words we have already quoted ; 
they are anything but vague. We shall con- 
sider St. Cyprian's in a moment. These two 
Fathers belong to the very first centuries of 
the Church. Father Newman has very truly 
remarked in his Theory of Development, 
that the ancient heretics, however at variance 
among themselves, combined, and it was the 
only time they combined, in hostility to the 
Catholic Church. " The Meletians of Africa 
united with the Arians against St. Athana- 
sius ; the semi-Arians of the Council of Sar- 
dica correspond with the Donalists of Africa ; 



204 The Pope. 

Nestorius received and protected the Pela- 
gians ; Aspar, the Arian minister of Leo the 
emperor, favored the Monophysites of Egypt ; 
the Jacobites of Egypt sided with the Mos- 
lem, who are charged with holding a Nes- 
torian doctrine. It had been so from the 
beginning. ' They huddle up a peace with 
all everywhere/ says Tertullian ; 'for it mak- 
eth no matter to them, although they hold 
different doctrines, so long as they conspire 
together in their siege against the one thing, 
Truth/ ' Bellum haereticorum pax est ex- 
clesia.' Against all these enemies the Fa- 
thers objected the unity of the Church as 
maintained in the See of Peter. " For this 
reason, " says St. Jerome, " out of the twelve 
(apostles) one is selected, that by the ap- 
pointment of a head, the occasion of schism 
may be taken away." This Father in his 
perplexity to know which of the three rival 
claimants at Antioch, he shall recognize as 
bishop, writes to Pope Damasus : " I follow 
here your colleagues, the confessors of Egypt, 



The Pope. 2 o5 

and, amidst the merchant vessels, I lie hid in 
a little boat. I know nothing of Vitalis — I 
reject Meletius — I care not for Paulinus. 
Whoever does not gather with you scatters ; 
that is, whoever is not of Christ, is of Anti- 
christ. I who follow none as my Chief but 
Christ, am associated in communion with thy 
Blessedness, that is, with the See of Peter ; 
on that rock the Church is built, I know." 
And in a second letter : " The Church here 
being split into three parts, each hastens to 
draw me to itself. The venerable authority 
of the monks who dwell around, assails me. 
In the meantime I cry out : Whoever is 
united with the Chair of Peter is mine. Me- 
letius, Vitalis, and Paulinus, affirm that they 
adhere to you. If one only made the asser- 
tion, I could believe ; but, in the present 
case, either two of them deceive me or all of 
them. Therefore I beseech you, Blessed 
Father, by the cross of our Lord, by the 
necessary ornament of our faith, by the pas- 
sion of Christ — as you succeed the apostles 



206 The Pope. 

in dignity, so may you rival them in merit — 
so may you sit on the throne of judgment 
with the twelve — so may another gird you 
like Peter in your old age/' that is, may you 
receive the crown of martyrdom — " so may 
you gain the franchise of the heavenly city 
with Paul ; declare to me by your letter with 
whom I should hold communion in Syria. 
Do not disregard a soul for which Christ 
died." Evidently he believed in the Pope's 
authority. " For the good of unity," says 
St. Optatus, " blessed Peter, alone received 
the keys." " He spaks to one," says St. 
Pacian, " that from one he might shape out 
unity," " In the single person of St. Peter," 
says St. Augustin, " our Lord cast the mould 
of His Church. . . in single Peter the unity ' 
of all the pastors was figured." " From the 
Roman Church, as from a fountain-head," 
says St. Ambrose (another Father calls it 
" the head and origin of the truth"), " the 
rights of venerable communities flow unto all. 
. . . ' Thou art Peter, &c.' Therefore — where 



The Pope. 207 

Peter is, there is the Church — ubi Petrus, ibi 
ecclesia ; ,? that is, that Church everywhere 
which communicates with the See of Peter, 
is the Catholic Church. " The Church," says 
St. John Chrysostom, " is stronger than hea- 
ven ; for heaven and earth shall pass away, 
but my word shall not pass away. What 
word ? ' Thou art Peter.' " 

Now let us listen to St. Cyprian : " Cer- 
tainly the other apostles also, were what 
Peter was, endued with an equal fellowship 
both of honor and power. But a commence- 
ment is made from unity, that the Church 
may be set before us as one ; ' My dove, my 
spotless one is but one ; she is the only one 
of her mother, elect of her that bore her/ 
He who does not hold this unity of the 
Church, does he think that he holds the 
faith ? For thus the blessed Apostle Paul 
manifests this sacrament of unity : ' There is 
one body and one Spirit, even as ye are 
called in one hope of your calling : one Lord, 
one faith, one baptism, one God.' This unity 



208 The Pope. 

we especially, bishops presiding in the 
Church, should hold and maintain, in order 
that we may prove the episcopate itself to be 
one and undivided. The episcopate is one, 
of which a part is held by each without divi- 
sion of the whole. The Church too is one, 
though she be spread abroad, and multiplies 
with the issue of her progeny : even as the 
sun has many rays, yet one light ; and the 
tree many boughs, yet its strength is one, 
seated in the deep-lodged root (elsewhere he 
calls the See of Peter " the root and womb 
of the Catholic Church ") ; and as when many 
streams flow down from one source, though 
a multiplicity of waters seem to be diffused 
from its broad, overflowing abundance, unity 
is preserved in the source itself. Part a ray 
of the sun from its orb, and its unity forbids 
this division of light ; break a branch from the 
tree, once broken it can bud no more ; cut 
the stream from its fountain, the remnant will 
be dried up. Thus the Church, flooded with 
the light of the Lord, puts forth her rays 






The Pope. 209 

through the whole world, yet with one light 
which is spread upon all places, while its 
unity of body is not infringed. She stretches 
forth her branches over the universal Earth, 
in the riches of plenty, and pours abroad her 
bountiful and onward streams ; — yet there is 
one Head, one source, one Mother, abounding 
in the products of her fruitfulness." Where is 
that Mother ? that source ? that head ? that 
centre ? "To Peter the Lord said : * Thou art 
the rock ;' to him again, after his resurrec- 
tion : ' Feed my sheep.' . . . God is one, and 
the Church is one, and one the chair founded 
upon the rock by the Lord's voice . . the 
chair of Peter, and that principal Church, 
from which the unity of the priesthood took 
its origin." 

A theory has been propounded of late 
which explains the necessary unity of the 
Church by the simple co-existence of legiti- 
mate successions of bishops, without any out- 
ward intercommunion, and indeed without 
unity of doctrine. " We make schism and 



2 1 o The Pope. 

separation from Christ lie in opposing our 
bishop, not the bishop of Rome," wrote the 
divines who published the Oxford translation 
of the Fathers. According to this- ingenious 
system, a bishop can never divide the Church, 
though he were a Macedonius or a Nestorius, 
a Dr. Colenso or a Dr. Temple. " They 
have not the same Lord," writes Dr. Pusey 
in his Eirenicon (p. 57), " who do not believe 
the sari^e truth as to Him. The heretics of 
old . . . believed not the same Lord." And 
do the heretics of to-day ? What is there 
common, say, between the Church of England 
and the Church of Rome ? between the 
churches subject to Canterbury and the 
churches subject to Westminster ? between 
the Protestant Episcopal Church of America 
and the Roman Catholic Church in the Uni- 
ted States ? Can any one who has not an 
object in view say that they are one ? Was 
that the oneness which Christ asked for when 
he prayed that his disciples should be one as 
God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are 



The Pope. 2 1 1 

one ? who said that " every kingdom divided 
against itself should be made desolate, and 
every house divided against itself shall fall ?" 
They have neither unity of government nor 
unity of belief. The sacrament of marriage 
is another image employed by the Apostle 
to represent the unity of the Church ; " they 
shall be two in one body." The Church of 
England was united to the Church of Rome : 
she and her daughter, the Episcopal Church 
of America, have been separated by divorce. 
" Whom God has united, let no man sepa- 
rate." Henry the Eighth cut the knot in 
England, as Luther did in Germany. What 
connection is there between a church which 
permits every variety of doctrine within its 
body, as the Church of England does, and a 
church which will not tolerate the slightest 
divergence from its authoritative teaching, 
like the Roman Church ? We, Romanists, 
insist on actual, visible, external communion 
with, and submission to, Rome, as of necessity 
to be in the Church ; the very highest An- 



212 The Pope. 

glicans do not. We maintain, as of faith, 
that the Church has uninterruptedly the 
power of exercising her gift of infallibility ; 
the highest Anglicans assume that, on ac- 
count of its " unhappy divisions" the exercise 
of that gift has been suspended in the Church. 
With Anglicans the necessity of baptism is 
an open question ; they have altered the form 
of confirmation ; and it is impossible to say 
what they do believe with regard to the Eu- 
charist. We say, no baptised Christian's 
mortal sins can be forgiven but by submitting 
them to the power of the keys ; at most, the 
Anglican Church leaves its members free to 
do as they please in this matter. We believe 
in the sacrament of Extreme Unction, as 
taught by St. James ; what does the Church 
of England, more than any sect, do for the 
soul at the moment of its passage to eternity ? 
Has the Church of England always believed 
holy orders to be a sacrament ? Does it, 
with its divorce courts, believe matrimony to 
be a sacrament ? Does it believe, as a 



The Pope. 213 

Church, in the existence of a purgatory ? n 
the power of indulgences ? in the interces- 
sion of Saints ? in the invocation of Mary, and 
her Immaculate Conception ? No, the Jew, 
the deist, and the Mahometan, who all be- 
lieve in one God, are not more certainly 
distinct from each other, than are the Greek, 
the Anglican, and the Roman communions, 
those so-called " branches" of the Christian 
Church. This is too serious a matter for 
mere fancy or sentiment. If the successor 
of St. Peter is the supreme head of Christ's 
Church, as the gentlemen who propose this 
theory admit, the English, the Episcopal 
Church, and every Protestant sect, is, to say 
the least, in a state of open schism. And 
how severe the early Fathers are in their 
judgments on mere schismatics, — not here- 
tics—I w iH n ot repeat, lest their expressions 
should appear to be too harsh. But I will 
conclude this lecture with the words of St. 
Augustin to the Donatists of Africa, who ad- 
mitted no error of doctrine, and whose only 



214 The Pope. 

fault was that, instead of saying, like Augus- 
tin, " Rome has spoken, the case is ended, 
Roma locuta est, causa est Anita," they would 
not submit to the decision of a pope of Rome 
in the appointment of a bishop : — " You are 
with us in baptism, in the creed, in the other 
sacraments of the Lord ; but in the spirit of 
unity, in the bond of peace, — in fine, in the 
Catholic Church itself, you are not with us 
. . . Those whom the Donatists baptise, they 
heal of the wound of idolatry or infidelity, 
but inflict a more grievous stroke in the 
wound of schism, . . the sacrilege of schism 
which surpasses all wickedness ; . . for idola- 
ters among God's people the sword des- 
troyed, but schismatics the gaping earth 
devoured" (alluding to the punishment of 
Core, Dathan and Abiron) . . . j' Wherefore the 
entire world judges with security that they 
are not good who separate themselves from 
the entire world, in whatevet part of the en- 
tire world . . And in whatever part of the 
world this has been done, or is done, or shall 



The Pope. 2 \ 5 

be, . . none can have so acted, unless . . 
furious . . or insane . . or corrupted . . or 
perverted." (And yet these Donatists were 
not insignificant in numbers, since they could 
gather a council of four hundred bishops, — 
more than ever England, or even Germany, 
witnessed together.) ....-" Outside the Cath- 
olic Church," says this Father, " a man may 
have everything — except salvation. He may 
have honor, he may have sacraments, he may 
sing Alleluia, he may answer Amen, he may 
hold the gospels, he may both have the faith, 
and preach it in the name of the Father and 
of the Son and of the Holy Ghost ; but no- 
where except in the Catholic Church will he 
be able to find salvation. For all these 
things pass away, my brethren. . . . " You 
know," he continues to the Donatists, who 
might be called the Nationalists of that time, 
u You know what the Catholic Church is, and 
what that is cut off from the vine. If there 
be any among you cautious let them come ; 
let them find life in the root. Come, brethren, 



2 1 6 The Pope. 

if you wish to be engrafted in the vine : a 
grief it is when we see you lying thus cut off. 
But you don't know how to shake off from 
your schismatical bishops. Number the 
bishops even from the very seat of Peter ; 
and see every succession in that line of 
Fathers : that is the rock against which the 
proud gates of hell cannot prevail." In the 
heart-kind charity which animates these 
words, all Catholic souls will sympathize; 
and, in a like spirit, they will address them 
to those who, at the present day, occupy the 
same position as the Donatists : — Come, 
brethren, and be grafted in the vine ; come, 
and take root in that apostolic See " against 
which the proud gates of hell cannot prevail." 



LECTURE VI. 

The Pope. 

We have now sufficiently considered the 
signs or marks, by which, according to the 
appointment of its founder, we are to distin- 
guish the true Church of Jesus Christ from all 
those which are of spurious origin ; and we 
have examined the grounds on which the 
Roman Catholic Church claims to possess 
in their integrity all these distinguishing signs 
and marks. We have also endeavored, so far 
as the limits of time would permit, to discuss 
the question, whether, to form truly a part 
of the Christian Church, it is necessary to be 
in active communication with the bishop of 
Rome, the successor in his episcopal see of 
St. Peter. I have said in one of my lectures 
that we might investigate the whole question 
of the Christian religion historically, that is, 



2 1 8 The Pope. 

by studying the records of the past genera- 
tions from the commencement of Christianity 
down to our own time, and seeing whether 
through all ages there has existed in un- 
broken duration, such a Church as the Roman 
Catholics maintain that the Christian Church 
from the beginning was, always has been, is, 
and must perpetually continue to be I pro- 
pose this evening thus to examine one point, 
namely, the necessity of active communion 
with the See of Rome, whether actual com- 
munion with the successor of St. Peter has 
always been considered a necessary condition 
for being a living member of the Christian 
Church : and, in order to do so briefly, I shall 
confine myself to, first, the testimony of the 
Greek Church, as represented in her General 
Councils, down to the Photian Schism, when, 
of course, having separated from the West, 
she ceased to acknowledge the necessity of 
that intercommunication ; and, secondly, the 
witness of another church, one of the church- 
es of the West, from that period up to the 



The Pope. 2 1 9 

moment when she too cut herself off from 
the centre of Catholic unity, the beginning of 
the Protestant Reformation. 

In the first three centuries, the age of per- 
secution, it was impossible to call together 
General Councils of the Church. The docu- 
ments for the ecclesiastical history of that 
epoch which have come down to us are also 
very scanty. Nevertheless those which we 
do possess, as Father Newman says, are suf- 
ficient to furnish us with " a cumulative argu- 
ment in favor of the active and doctrinal 
authority of Rome." Thus Father Newman 
resumes that argument, in the introduction to 
his essay on Development: "The Anti-Ni- 
cene testimonies which may be cited in 
behalf of the authority of the Holy See . . 
faint they may be one by one, but at least 
they are various, and are drawn from many 
times and countries, and thereby serve to 
illustrate each other, and form a body of 
proof. Thus St. Clement, in the name of the 
Church of Rome, writes a letter to the Corin- 



2 20 The Pope, 

thians, when they were without a bishop ; 
St. Ignatius of Antioch addresses the Roman 
Church, and it only out of the churches 
to which he writes, as ' the Church which has 
the first seat in the place of the country of 
the Romans ;' St. Poly carp of Smyrna be- 
takes himself to the bishop of Rome on the 
question of Easter ; the heretic Marcion, ex- 
communicated in Pontus, betakes himself to 
Rome ; Soter, bishop of Rome, sends alms, 
according to the custom of his church, to the 
churches throughout the empire, and, in the 
words of Eusebius, 'affectionately exhorted 
those who came to Rome, as a father his 
children ;' the Montanists from Phrygia came 
to Rome to gain the countenance of its 
bishop ; Praxeas, from Africa, attempts the 
like, and for a while is successful ; St. Victor, 
bishop of Rome, threatens to excommunicate 
the Asian churches. St. Irenaeus speaks of 
Rome as * the greatest Church, the most an- 
cient, the most conspicuous, and founded and 
established by Peter and Paul,' appeals to its 



The Pope. 2 2 1 

tradition, not in contrast indeed, but in pre- 
ference to that of other churches, and de- 
clares that, ' in this Church, every church, that 
is, the faithful from every side, must meet,' or 
'agree together, propter po:iorem principali- 
tatem (on account of its higher chiefdom).' 
\ O Church, happy is its position,' says Ter- 
tullian, ' into which the Apostles poured out, 
together with their blood, their whole doc- 
trine.' The presbyters of St. Dionysius, 
bishop of Alexandria, complain of his doc- 
trine to St. Dionysius of Rome ; the latter 
expostulated with him, and he explains. The 
Emperor Aurelian leaves to the bishops of 
Italy and Rome, the decision whether or not 
Paul of Samosata shall be dispossessed of the 
see-house at Antioch ; St. Cyprian speaks of 
Rome as ' the see of Peter and the principal 
Church, whence the unity of the priesthood 
took its rise . . . whose faith has been com- 
mended by the apostles, to whom faithlessness 
can have no access ;' St. Stephen (pope) 
refuses to receive St. Cyprian's deputation, 



222 The Pope. 

and separates himself from various churches 
of the East ; Fortunatus and Felix, deposed 
by St. Cyprian, have recourse to Rome ; 
Basilides, deposed in Spain, betakes himself 
•to Rome, and gains the ear of St. Stephen." 
The first general council after peace was 
restored to the Church, was that of Nice, or 
Nicaea. All the first eight councils were 
held in the East, and were composed almost 
entirely of Eastern bishops. "They were all 
held in the East," says the Protestant Guizot, 
" by bishops oi the East, under the influence 
of the emperors of the East." This gives to 
the testimony of these councils in favor of the 
supremacy of the Roman See, much greater 
weight : the East was always jealous of the 
West, and little inclined to grant it any pre- 
rogative, except such as had been always 
indubitably acknowledged from the beginning 
of the Church. Another observation to be 
made here is, that the witness of these earliest 
councils proves not only what was the con- 
temporaneous belief of the Church, but also 



The Pope. 223 

what had been believed in the preceding 
ages. This is evident, if history does not tell 
us of the existence of a previous contradic- 
tory belief. For it is impossible that a com- 
plete and sweeping revolution should have 
taken place in the faith of Christendom, 
without leaving its trace in history, with- 
out even exciting at the time violent re- 
sistance and contests, all of which would 
have been recorded. Besides, the Fathers of 
these councils always appeal to the tradition 
of the Church as the foundation and ground- 
work of the faith which they profess. The 
Council of Nicaea, convoked (as we learn 
from the 1 8th act of the 6th General Council, 
the 3d of Constantinople) by Constantine 
and the Pope, St. Sylvester, to settle the 
question of Arianism, met in the year 325. 
The Pope was represented by his prelate 
Osius, bishop of Cordova, and there were 
present many confessors of the faith during 
the days of persecution. The formula of 
faith adopted at this council, since known as 



224 The Pope. 

the Nicene Creed, was written at the dictation 
of Osius, the papal legate ; after which it 
was read alone by him and signed by the 
bishops present. Here we see how the 
Fathers of this oecumenical council imitated 
the conduct of the apostles in the first council 
of Jerusalem. There, after there had been 
much disputing, St. Peter rose, pronounced 
his opinion, and an end was put to the dis- 
cussion ; then St. James, and after him the 
others, having approved of what St. Peter • 
had said, the council was closed. The Coun- 
cil of Nice distinctly declares in one of its 
canons the primacy of the Roman See, to- 
gether with the superior jurisdiction of the 
patriarchates of Antioch and Alexandria. I 
give it as it stands in the apostolic canons. 
" The Primacy has always resided in the 
Church of Rome. Let the ancient custom 
then be vigorously maintained in Egypt, 
Libya, and Pentapolis, so that all pay the 
homage of submission to the bishop of Alex- 
andria, for so the Roman Pontiff orders. Let 



The Pope. 22S 

tae same be observed with respect to the 
bishop of Antioch ; and so in all other prov- 
inces, let the various churches keep their 
own privileges." The strength of this allu- 
sion to the bishop of Antioch and Alexandria 
will be understood when we consider why it 
was that they were treated as possessing 
greater dignity than the other churches after 
Rome. It was because St. Peter himself had 
first resided at Antioch before going to 
Rome, and from Rome he sent his disciple 
St. Mark the evangelist to found the See of 
Alexandria. " Though there were several 
apostles," says St. Gregory the Great, " yet 
only one of them, whose place is in three 
different churches, could give to these a par- 
amount influence over all other churches. 
St. Peter gave the first rank to the see in 
which he designed to fix his authority and to 
close his immortal career. It is he who illus- 
trated the see to which he sent his disciple, 
the evangelist ; it is he again who established 
the see of Antioch, in which he sat for seven 



226 The Pope. 

years ; so that they form but one and the 
same see." " The three patriarchs," says St. 
Leo, ''occupy one and the same apostolic 
chair, because all three have succeeded to the 
see of Peter and to his Church, founded by 
Jesus Christ in unity, and to which he gave 
one single head to preside over three princi- 
cipal sees in the three patriarchal cities, that 
the indissoluble union of the three sees might 
bind the other churches more closely to the 
divinely constituted head." Out of 318 
bishops present at the council of Nicaea, only 
22 were from Europe, the rest belonged to 
Asia and Africa ; how then was it to be made 
oecumenical ? By the approval of its acts by 
the bishop of Rome : " it was determined 
that all these things should be sent to Sylves- 
ter, bishop of the city of Rome." In the 
year 347 a council was held at Sardica, which 
has generally been considered as a sort of 
continuation of that of Nice. It was pre- 
sided over by the papal legate, and St. 
Athanasius was present. This council taking 



The Pope. 227 

into consideration the abuses in the promo- 
tion of bishops, judged that the proper 
remedy for such an evil was to appeal to the 
superior jurisdiction of Rome. " This will 
seem the best," it writes to the Pope Julius, 
" and by far the most fitting, if the Lord's 
bishops make reference from all the provinces 
to the head, that is, the see of the apostle 
Peter." The great figure of this epoch was 
St. Athanasius. When Athanasius was ex- 
pelled from Alexandria by an intruded Asian 
bishop, he repaired to Rome, where he was 
received and protected by the Pope, who 
wrote thus to the East :— " Know you not 
that the canonical rule was to recur first to 
our authority, and that the decision must 
proceed from it? Such is the tradition that 
we have received from the blessed apostle 
Peter, and I believe it to be so universally 
acknowledged that I should not recall it here 
if these deplorable circumstances did not 
constrain me to proclaim it." 

The second General Council, the first of 



228 .-. The Pope. 

Constantinople, was held in the year 381, 
under Pope St. Damasus. This was the 
Pope to whom St. Jerome wrote such touch- 
ing appeals to tell him with whom to hold 
communion at Antioch ; and to whom St. 
Basil wrote equally earnest letters to settle 
the disputes among the Asiatic churches. A 
letter from him read to the Fathers of this 
council, " that they might be able to learn 
what care he bore for all the churches/' 
showed to what an extent his ecclesiastical 
jurisdiction was acknowledged. " That your 
charity, most honored children, " he says, 
" should have rendered due reverence to the 
Apostolic seat, is a matter of the greatest 
merit to yourselves. Why is it then that 
you ask of me again the abdication of Timo- 
thy ? This bishop was deprived of his see 
here (in Rome) by the judgment of the 
Apostolic seat, in the presence of -Peter 
(bishop) of Alexandria, as well as Apollinaris, 
his master, who will likewise on the day of 
judgment suffer a deserved chastisement and 



The Pope. 229 

judgment." This Council, being held at Con- 
stantinople, passed a decree that the bishop 
of Constantinople should rank next to that 
of Rome, before those of Antioch and Alex- 
andria. The popes would never approve of 
this decision, and it never became law. With 
this exception, the acts of the Council having 
been sent to the Pope," " blessed Damasus," 
says Phoetius, " by his authority, confirmed 
the second Council." 

The third General Council assembled at 
Ephesus in the year 431, to decide on the 
doctrine of Nestorius. Now, mark you, 
Nestorius was archbishop of Constantinople. 
In his letter to the Council, the Pope St. Cel- 
( estine says that his legate will preside, " and 
shall carry into effect what we have before 
determined," namely, the deposition of Nes- 
torius. The Council deposes Nestorius in 
the following terms : u Nestorius, having 
refused to answer our summons and to re- 
ceive the bishop sent to him, we have been 
obliged to enter upon an examination of his 



230 The Pope. 

impieties. He is convicted on the evidence 
of his letters, his writings and his discourses, 
of holding and spreading scandalous and 
heretical opinions. Bound by the holy canons, 
and by the letter of our holy Father Celestine, 
Bishop of Rome, we are reduced, not without 
tears of heartfelt sorrow, to the cruel neces- 
sity of pronouncing this sentence against 
him : Our Lord Jesus Christ, whom he has 
blasphemed, decides through this most holy 
Council, that he is deprived of his episcopal 
dignity, and cut off from every ecclesiastical 
body." " In this sentence, says Bossuet, 
" the Fathers recognize in the Pope's letter, 
the force of a judicial sentence, to which they 
feel bound to subscribe." Then the legate 
says: "We return thanks to the holy and 
venerable Council, that the letters of our holy 
Pope having been read to you, you have 
joined yourselves as holy members to a holy 
Head. For your Holiness is not ignorant 
that the blessed Apostle Peter is head of the 
whole faith, and of the apostles themselves/' 



The Pope. 231 

And afterwards he continues : " It is doubt- 
ful to no one, but rather known to all ages, 
that holy and most blessed Peter, prince and 
head of the apostles, pillar of the faith, and 
foundation of the Catholic Church, received 
from our Lord Jesus Christ, Savior and Re- 
deemer of the human race, the keys of the 
kingdom of heaven, and that the power of 
loosing and binding sins * was given to him ; 
who to this very time and forever lives, and 
exercises judgment on his successors. And 
so our most blessed Pope Celestine the bish- 
op, his successor in due order, and holding 
his place, has sent us to this holy Council to 
represent him." Then the other legates, 
among whom was St. Cyril, archbishop of 
Alexandria,, having declared that they had 
11 fulfilled what was ordered them," the Council 
found that they had " said what was fitting ;" 
and so the Council terminated. 

The fourth General Council met at Chalce- 
don, in the year 45 1, and w r as attended by 
over 600 .bishops, the largest number ever 



232 The Pope. 

assembled together until the present Council 
of the Vatican. They were all Easterns, with 
the exception of two Roman legates and two 
Africans. At the opening of the first session 
the legates of the Pope rose and said : " We 
have in our hands the commands of the most 
blessed and apostolic man, Pope of the city 
of Rome, which is the head of all churches, 
in which his Apostleship has thought fit to 
order that Dioscorus should not sit in the 
Council, but be introduced to make his de- 
fence. He must give an account of the 
judgment he passed ; inasmuch as not having 
the right to judge, he presumed and dared 
to hold a council without the authority of the 
Apostolic See, a thing which never was law- 
ful, never has been done." And the bishop 
Dioscorus, who was patriarch of Alexandria, 
was not allowed to sit in the Council. The 
great St. Leo was the then reigning Pope. 
No pontiff has insisted more fully on the right 
of the Roman See to supreme jurisdiction 
over the whole Church than this great saint. 



The Pope. 233 

Allow me to quote a little at length the words 
of so great a Pontiff, as he exposes beauti- 
fully the Catholic doctrine on this point. 
Thus he writes to the bishop of Thessalonica, 
when constituting hihi patriarch over all the 
metropolitan sees of Greece and part of 
Thrace : " As my predecessors to your pre- 
decessors, so have I, following the example 
of those gone before, committed to your 
affection my charge of government, that you, 
imitating our gentleness, might relieve the 
care, which we, in virtue of our headship, by 
divine institution, owe to all churches, and 
might in some degree discharge our personal 
visitation to provinces far distant from us. 
For we have entrusted your affection to rep- 
resent us on this condition, that you are 
called to a part of our solicitude, but not to 
the fullness of our power. But if in a matter 
which you believe proper to be considered 
and decided on with your brethren, their sen- 
tence differs from yours, let everything be 
referred to us on the authority of the Acts, 



2 34 The Pope. 

that all doubtfulness may be removed, and we 
may decree what pleaseth God. For the 
compactness of our unity cannot remain firm 
unless the bond of charity weld us into an 
inseparable whole; because, 'as we have 
many members in one body, and all the mem- 
bers have not the same office, so we, being 
many, are one body in Christ, and every one 
member one of another.' For it is the con- 
nection of the whole body which makes one 
soundness, and one beauty ; and this connec- 
tion, as it requires unanimity in the whole 
body, so especially demands concord among 
bishops. For, though these have a like dig- 
nity, yet they have not an equal jurisdiction : 
since even among the blessed Apostles, as 
there was a likeness of honor, so was there a 
certain distinction of power ; and, the election 
of all being equal, pre-eminence over the 
rest was given to one. From which type the 
distinction also between bishops has arisen, 
and it was provided by a great ordering that 
all should not claim to themselves all things, 



The Pope. 235 

but that in every province there should be 
one whose sentence should be considered the 
first among his brethren ; and others again, 
seated in the greater cities, should undertake 
a larger care, through) whom the direction of 
the Universal Church should converge to the 
one See of Peter, and nothing anywhere dis- 
agree from its head." And thus he speaks 
to the bishops gathered around him at Rome, 
on the anniversary of his pontificate : " Al- 
though, beloved, our partaking in that gift 
(of unity) be a great subject for common joy, 
yet it were . . more profitable to raise the 
minds eye to the contemplation of the most 
blessed Apostle Peter's glory, . . who was* 
watered with streams so copious from the 
very fountain of all graces, that while nothing 
has passed to others without his participation, 
yet he received many privileges of his own. 
. . Christ had given up Himself wholly to 
restore the race of man. Nothing was un- 
ordered to His wisdom; nothing difficult to 
His power . . Yet out of the whole world 



236 The Pope. 

Peter is chosen to preside over the calling of 
all the Gentiles, and over all the Apostles 
and collected Fathers of the Church ; so 
that, though there may be among the people 
of God many priests and many shepherds, 
yet Peter rules all by immediate commission, 
whom Christ also rules by sovereign power. 
Beloved, it is a great and wonderful partici- 
pation of His own power which the Divine 
condescendence gave to this man ; and if He 
willed that other rulers should enjoy aught 
together with him, yet never did He give, 
save through him, what He denied not to 
others. The Lord asks all the Apostles what 
men think of Him . . But when what the 
disciples think is required, he who is first in 
apostolic dignity is first also in confessing the 
Lord. And when he had said, 'Thou art 
Christ the Son of the living God,' Jesus 
answered him, ' Blessed art thou Simon Bar- 
Jona, . . . And I,' saith He, ' say unto thee/ 
— that is, as my Father hath manifested to 
thee My Godhead, as I too make known unto 



The Pope. 237 

thee thine own pre-eminence, — ' For thou art 
Peter,' that is whilst I am the immutable Rock; 
I the Corner Stone who make both one ; 
I the Foundation beside which no one can 
lay another ; yet thou also art a Rock, because 
by My virtue thou art firmly planted, so that 
whatever is peculiar to Me by power, is to 
thee by participation common with Me, — 
' and upon this Rock I will build My Church, 
and the gates of hell shall not prevail against 
it.' . . . This confession the gates of hell 
shall not restrain, nor the chains of death 
fetter ; for that voice is the voice of life. And 
as it raises those who confess it unto heavenly 
places, so it plunges those who deny it into 
hell. Wherefore it is said to the most blessed 
Peter, < I will give to thee the keys of the 
kingdom of heaven.' . . The privilege of this 
power did indeed pass on to the other apos- 
tles, and the order of this decree spread out 
to all the rulers of the Church, but not with- 
. out purpose, what is intended for all is put 
into the hands of one. For therefore is this 



238 The Pope. 

entrusted to Peter singularly, because all the 
rulers of the Church are invested with the 
figure of Peter. The privilege therefore of 
Peter remaineth . . nothing is bound, nothing 
loosed, save what blessed Peter either bind- 
eth or looseth . . Again the Lord saith, 
' Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to 
have you ; but I have prayed for thee, that 
thy faith fail not, and when thou art con- 
verted confirm thy brethren/ The danger 
from the temptation of fear was common to 
all the apostles, . . and yet the Lord takes 
care of Peter in particular, and asks specially 
for the faith of Peter, as if the state of the 
rest would be more certain, if the mind of 
their chief were not overcome. So then in 
Peter the strength of all is fortified, and the 
help of divine grace is so ordered, that the 
stability which through Christ is given to 
Peter, through Peter is conveyed to the 
apostles. Reasonably and justly then do w r e 
rejoice . . rendering thanks to the Eternal 
King, our Redeemer, the Lord Jesus Christ, 



The Pope. 239 

for having given so great a power to him 
whom He made chief of the whole Church 
. . to whom, after His resurrection, in answer 
to the triple profession of eternal love, (He) 
thrice said, with mystical intent, ' Feed My 
Sheep/ And thus, beyond a doubt, the pious 
shepherd does even now, and fulfils the charge 
of his Lord, confirming us . . . To him there- 
fore let us ascribe this anniversary day of us 
his servant, by whose advocacy we have been 
thought worthy to share his seat itself, the 
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ helping us in 
all things." Pius IX would not, in Rome, to- 
day, speak otherwise to the Catholic world 
than did, 14 centuries ago, Pope St. Leo to 
the bishops of the Church, gathered around 
him in Rome. 

To return to the Council of Chalcedon : 
Dioscorus is deposed by the Papal legate, 
thus : " Paschasinus, — and Lucentius, — and 
Boniface, — pronounced. Leo, most holy and 
blessed Archbishop of great and elder Rome, 
by us, and by this holy Council, together with 



240 The Pope. 

the most blessed Apostlq Peter, who is the 
Rock and ground of the Catholic Church, 
and the foundation of the right faith, hath 
stripped him of the rank of bishop, and hath 
severed him from all sacerdotal ministry.'' 
And the Fathers exclaim : " Dioscorus has 
been juridically deposed. It is God Himself 
who has condemned Dioscorus. ,, And in 
their letter to St. Leo, asking his approval of 
their decisions, they say, of this same Dios- 
corus, " He turned his insane rage against 
him to whom our Divine Savior entrusted 
the care of His vineyard, — that is, against 
Your Apostolic Holiness, the very person 
entrusted by the Savior with the guardianship 
of the vine/' This was the most boisterous 
of the early Councils. The Fathers almost 
unanimously were opposed to an explicit 
condemnation of the doctrine of Eutyches : 
like many of the Fathers of the Vatican 
Council with regard to the definition of Papal 
Infallibility, they judged it inopportune. 
When the Papal legates however insisted, 



The Pope. 241 

they yielded, and Eutyches was condemned. 
It was the consideration of this fact which 
determined the conversion to the Catholic 
Church of John Henry Newman. St. Leo's 
letter explaining the Catholic faith was read 
in the Council ; and, at the close of its lecture, 
the Fathers, with one voice, cried out : "This 
is the faith of the Fathers ! this is the faith 
of the Apostles ! this is what we all believe ! 
anathema to him who believes not thus ! Peter 
has spoken by the mouth of Leo !" 

These were the first four great Councils of 
the Church, w r hich St. Gregory declared 
should be held in the same veneration as the 
four gospels, and which, I believe, have 
always been accepted by Protestants as truly 
representing the belief of early Christendom, 
I am obliged to pass over the remaining 
Councils. The last General Council held in 
the East was at Constantinople, in 869, im- 
mediately before its final separation from the 
West. In it all the bishops signed the fol- 
lowing profession, in which they condemned 



in advance and eternally the schism tl 

to consilium 

pass* d by, 
who sa rhou art 1' nd upon this 

k I w ill build my Church, 1 th< 

I l>y th Ct which has followed : 

tolic S 
religion h pt immaculate, and 

holy doctrif* there. Whei 

by no means desirii I from 

its faith and doctrine, and following in all 
things t!v i of the Fathers, and 

chiefly of the holy Prelates of the Ap 

anathematize all heresi* , . . con- 
ning, | 
of S ides, that i i have not 

red to use their tongue against their Spir- 
itual Father. Since following in all thin 
the A; See, and observing in all thin 

its Constitutions, we hope that we may be 
worthy to be in one communion, which the 
Apostolic Sec makes known, in which is the 
complete and true solidity of the Christian 



TJu Pope. 243 

igion. And this my pn n I have 

written with my own hand and delivered to 
thee, must holy Hadrian, Supreme Pontiff 

1 Universal P In [439, a council 

was called al . for the reunion of the 

Greek Church, which was attended by bishops 
both of the I n and Western church 

In it tl iwing was passed, which 

was ribed by the Eastern bishops, and 

rec< in all the churches of Asia, Africa, 

Italy, i ind and I iermany : M We 

define that the Apostoli . that is, the 

Roman Pontiff, has the right of Primacy over 
all the churches of the world; that the Ro- 
man Pontiff >r of St Peter ; 
that he is the very Vicar of Christ, the head 
of the whole Church, the Father and teacher 
of all the faithful : that, in the person of St. 
Peter, he was entrusted by our Lord with full 

wer to feed, direct, and govern the whole 
llock of Christ. Such is manifestly the doc- 
trine taught by the Acts of the General 
Council, as well as by the sacred canons." 



:\.\ Tht /' 

The Greeks wer i J, faith! 

en '<>re 

the M i lent, 

x let iefly, .it 

historj nother I I the 

West, that ire n e what 

on this point, t- n down to the 

moment when it broke <>t't I 
in ruler, 

[n the south i >i land, near tl 

lei, may 1" the Mon- 

bbot si 
hi- in the days of Henry \ III. for his 

fidelity to the Catholic Church and the 
of the K' >m in I'- >ntiff, his spiritu 

rth« I [ere traditi eph of 

Arim tthe i v. h \ ' '■ 1 the 1" f < >nr I ,<>nl 

in his own sepulchre in the virgin r<> 

mpanied by some faithful disci] ent 

by the A; - Philip from the of 

Gaul, first planted tlv ; in the British 

Isles and erected a place of worship to the 



P&pe. 245 

rid only ( I L Thrice was England con- 
ted, it" this tradition be true, to the Chris- 
tian faith : in x, in the 
days < »f P< >]><• Eleutherius, and b) St. i Gregory 

A i ( Hildas and the Venerable Bede inform 

itish King 1 . »nt ambassadors 

to Ro k for bishops to instruct his 

Christian religion. This is 1 

markable : « tnd t« 1 R< ime ? At 

that time flourisl Alban Butler remarks, 

US in the Church of ( ',aul. 

Why was n ius content with sending 

instru city of I ,yons, where 

ned with episcopal authority, 

who was th of Polycarp, who was 

himself the disciple of the evangelist St. 

\n ? The reason could only be, beca 

n in those days of Pagan persecution, in 

entury, the remote Britons under- 

od that the centre of Christian unity and 

power was in the city of imperial Rome. 

When the Donatist schism in Africa and 



A- 

ianism in the East, threatened to rend I 
f the CI 
were held nn th< \ and .it 

it both th< British l>i- h< 

leir communion 
with tl I in faith. Bui when 

th'- errors of Pelagius, hii a Briton, be 

tnd, it I lestine 

who sent at the same time St Patrick into 

I land and St. ( icrmanus ol AuxeiTC to 

Bi itain, and. . made the 

barbarian isle Christian, while he endea* 

e the Roman i l 

This P< lagius, like .ill the ian lis 

ol that time me, in tlv of 

cloaking <>\ er hi by the 

appearance of favor from the Holy S 
1 here In- ion of 

his doctrine, which St. Augustin has pn 

served to us. and which winds uj •• \\\ : 

desire that it may be amended 1 \ you who 
hold both the faith and th< r ; 

if. how ir confession is approved 



Ill 24 7 

Igment of your Apostolate, el It 
and the Pelagian 
wa disappear, like all the other 

h< 1 

rything to the Popes. 
Whei 

igland had been subju- 
tain beautiful 

Roman market 

he inquired win and 

when I I that the) \n- 

laimed, M not . but Angels 

impression produced 

that day : r in his heart, and 

I \ >pe, he was n< »t c< intent 

till he had sent I >nk Augustin with his 

inions to convert those noble barbarians 

of the North to the true faith, with only the 

not to be able to accompany them 

himself. I monks embarked tothenum- 

the island, and landed on the 

LSt of Kent, then ruled by king Ethelbert, 

whom they converted with his people to 



Christian: 1 ustin \\a : a 

bishop by the legate of the H0I3 Se< in 
> I the numb ts in 

ent him, with \\ ritt< 
as ho* sh 

mi and the ('allium, the sign oi av 

chi al authoi . In his instru* dona 

he dir«(ts him to divide the countr) into 
dio he was to appoint 

I by himself, I [ere let us 
1 - Vugustii He 
h unless he had I m. 

ording I low 

can the) preach unless tl I le 

was sent b) 1 

And who gave him jurisdiction over the in 
habitants of the island ? Was it the pagan 
kii Kent ? I Md he nize any s] 

itual supn in that monarch ? It 

rin Gregory win him all jurisdiction. 

Thus the Pope writes to him: '• Let your 
Fraternity have all the bishops of Britain 
subject to you by the authority of our Lord 



The Pope 249 

A :" and again : - We give you no author- 
ity bishops of Gaul ; but we commit 
iternity the care oi all British 
bisho] Therefore the faith which Augus- 
lin. th archbishop of Canterbury planted 
in England, was that of Gregory. What was 

to the prerogatives of 

. we may learn from his writings. 

Thus he writes to the same prolate of Gaul 

wh 1 Augustin bishop: "Since 

<»no knows whence the holy faith came 

n your Brotherhood asks anew 

nt custom of the apostolic see, 

wh i it but as a L^ood child, recur to the 

K>m <>f its mother? We -rant therefore 

to your I hood to represent ourselves 

in that Church . . according to the ancient 

torn, which has God for its author." "To 

all who knowtlv el," he writes again, "it 

of the whole Church 
was entrusted by the will of the Lord to the 
ho' :1<- Peter, chief of all the apostles. 

For to him is said, 4 Lovest thou me?' to 



! 

him is said ( nfirm thy brethi Ml 

him I, ' Thou art P&er.' . , Who 

norant that the holy Church is establish* d on 
the stability of this chief of the apostles, who 
in his name exp re s sed the firmness o( his 
mind, being called I om tin R< * k ? . . 

I >, he hath r ived the 1 the kingdom 

i. the i >t binding and l< 

the ilc chunh and the sup 

■ 
onl 

Tht S l grland * n\ erted in the 

S ith. In the North it was made Christi 
Irish monk I and mm. 

of [ona, who setded under St. Aidan at Lin 
disfarne* These monks brought with them 
the peculiar custom of their founder, St. 
Columban, with regard t<> tin tion of 

1 aster. Thi - led to the fatm \ 
troversy, in which figured tl.< ted St. 

Wilfrid, the I Daniel of the Anglo Saxon 
Church. The Fathers of the British Church 
assembled in synod at Whitby, in the presence 
of King Oswio. Before them. Wilfrid under- 



'/v. 25 1 

>ity of following the 
Roma >m in this matter in preference 

that < monks, after this \\ ise : M If 

: and \ ■« >ur said he, " refuse to 

the d < >f the Apo See, . . 

without don: sin, For although your 

I ■ h«>ly. is their scanty number in 

remity of an island to he 
I Church of Christ, 
wh ; hroughout the world ? And 

it' I >an wa , ■ preferred 

t« i the m I Prince of the Apostles, 

to whom the L<>rd sa Thou art Peter, 

I [e n king ( )swio, turning to 

Iman, the bishop of Lindisfarne, asked 
him : M Col man, is it true that the Lord said 
this " It is true, O 

kin-." the bishop replied. "Do you both 
it any question in this, that these 
words ially to Peter, and that 

the Lord gave him the keys of the kingdom 
of heaven ? ' " Yes, indeed," they answered. 
"Then," rejoined he "in that case I would 



I such a dooi I 
is he, and so far as I know and can, 1 
to 

in i I rive 

to 

me, when he will have turned his 
k wh. hold the kej . 

I tion in principle : with 

it Irish I thro igh- 

out all Britain, Wilfrid ura - d 

I n in th< rnment of the Northum- 

brian Church, l» aid the carl 

ipline 
A: - it the li thi i precur- 

■ - not 

tined t< i be a I .ike St John 

Chr j incurred the hatred of 

a vengeful queen, or like another Athanasius, 
he was ed again and again to appeal for 

protection to the S of Rome, and it was 
only by the authority of tl tign Pon- 

tiff that his enemies, both clerical and lay, 
were obliged to yield him final justice. 



Pope* 253 

All md had become Catholic and an 

ind of saints. Out of die sole royal family 

of King Ethelbert sprang nine canonized 

aainl [Tiirty of those English princes and 

many more of whom retired to 

1 in mona and convents, have 

honors of the Church. 

1 1 .* n more h has come down 

time than that of the historian of 

:\ Church, Saint, or as he is 

I, the venerable Bede. What 

did It of the faith of the Anglo- 

Church think on the necessity of com- 
munion with the successor of St. Peter? 
11 1 ! :\" he writes, ,l received in 

ial way the keys of the kingdom of 
heaven* and the headship of judicial power, 
that all \y i throughout the world may 

understand that wlv r in any way sepa- 

• them from the unity of his faith or 

iety, such are not able to be absolved 
from the bonds of their sins, nor to enter the 
threshold of the heavenly kingdom." To 



»54 Th 

the next nion ufu-r I: ] . hclongi the 

learned Ahum, th.' Angj i S ixon priest of 
York and friend of Charl n ••. Tims kg 

writes to the Chui I yon i - Lei no 

1 itholic dare ntend against the authority 

of the ' hurch. And Ust 
schismatic an . let him fbBow 

the a] I authority of the hoi] Roman 

c hurch." adds in another place. 

W • Church is all the rest bj 

decrees of synods, but holds its primacy 
thr authorit) elf, irho nid, 

'Thou art Petei . . Wh, nee it is to be 

understood that holy and I men in all 

part, of the world, shining with the light of 

ind science, not only have not d 
parted from this holy Roman ( hurch, but 
also in time of need have implored help from 
it for the corroboration of the faith ; which 
thing, as we have already said and | by 

examples, all members of the Catholic Church 
ought, as a rule, to do : so as to seek from it 
(the Roman Church) next after Christ, help 



The Pop:. 2 55 

to defend the faith ; which (church) not hav- 
ing spot or wrinkle, both sets its foot upon 
irons head of heresy, and confirms 
the minds of the faithful in the faith." 

Th< Archbishop of Canterbury, under 

Norman rule, was Lanfranc. Almost at 
the beginning of his episcopate broke out 
between him and Thomas, the appointed 
:• of York, the chronic quarrel be- 
tween York and Canterbury about the right 
ot primacy overall England. Thomas denied 
Lanfranc's superiority; but was obliged to 

submit in a council held at Winton, of which 
nfranc thus reports to the Pope : " As the 

est strength and foundation of the cause 
(th; |, there were pro- 

duced the grants and writings of your prede- 
<>ry. Boniface, Honorius,Vitalian, 
S rgius, ( ry, and the last Leo, which, 

fr.»m time to time, for various causes, were 
given or transmitted to the prelates of the 
Church of Canterbury and the Kings of 
England" Both these Archbishops after- 



A- 

wards went to Rome to n confirm* 

tiog ol their jurisdiction in their i 

S 

' he friend of Lanfranc, and his si* 
in t! " S lerlmry. v n. Ansclni. 

i. in 
"i the W< stern I Ihurch, but rani 
most num. nl of Christian philosopher*. \\ 

sentiments with regard to the bishop 
' 1 1- dedicates his work o 
Trinirj to the I lolj i ather in these words \ 
" ' orasmuch as tl, 

^*° ommit to your cus- 

tody the lit'-- of kith of i and • 

-"• His Church, to no otb 

reference be more rightl) ma ay- 

thing contrary to the Catholic faith in 

the Church, that it may t> ted by 1 

authority ; nor to any ol 
which may be written against si be 

mor sly submitl .. by his prudence 

it may be examined ... Let those wh 
spise the Christian da of the Vicar of 



The Pope. 25; 

and in him the decrees of Peter and 
of Christ, seek for other of the king- 

n of heaven ; (! tainly they shall not 

ter in by those th which the Apos- 

?( t< r is to lui\ c stolen al- 

most this wise thought from eood kingfOswio. 

o o o 

It is to i i >f surprise then to see this great 

hampion of the I loly See 
he pretension of the English mon- 
i by the o >nveyance of investi- 
ture tual authority to the English bish- 
bishops of that day to a man were 
•urtly as they proved them- 
to be fi Ait i enturies later. In that 
roi: mi barl time they were often 
understo* >d better the use of the 
batl and hunting spear than of the mi- 
tre or th< But Anselm alone over- 
kin--, bishops, and barons, in this con- 
• for the independence of the Church of 
rist " I prefer to quit your land," he said, 
"until you acknowledge the pope, rather than 

n for an hour, to St. 



77/, P 

Peter an I hi V . . I will run to th< 

of the iin il. the supreme | and 

I the kingdom 

heai en and tl 

quered by tl of hell, and ol hold 

( in such a manner, thai th< 

de tpised ( In lared himseli 

and In him 
to th< in like manner, prin 

cipallj \u\ through him to 

the other bishops, and n 

ny king, nor to a duke, no 
count. . . • Ren the things that 

{ I the things thai a 

. . The faith which is I to man 

tak< from the faith which 

to God He who abjures blessed Peter, un 
doubtedly abjures Christ, who made him 
prin e o er (all) his Church." 

St. Anselm was a confessor: St Thomas 
of Canterbury was a martyr. The modern 
visitor to the old Cathedral of Canterbury can 
witness with his own eyes the pa 



The Pop,-. jSt) 

worn into by the Catholic pilgrims 

of England ascending on their knees to pray 
before the tomb of the glorious Becket Thus 
writes he whose blood spilled by the hands 
of, ins for having resisted a tyrant in 

the same cause with Anselm, has left its 
stains to this very day on the flags of this 
old Cathedra] : — 

•• The Fountain of Paradise is one, but di- 
vided into many streams! that it may water 
rth. Who doubts that the Church 
is the head of all the churches, and 

the fountain of Catholic truth? Who is igno- 
rant that the keys of the kingdom of heaven 

were entrusted to St. Peter? Does not the 
Structure of the whole Church rise from the 
faith and doctrine of Peter? . . . Whosoever 
he l>e that waters or plants, God gives in- 
to non<\ save to him who has planted 
in the faith of Peter, and rests in the doctrine 
of Peter. . , . From the Apostolic See, none 
but infidels or heretics or schismatics with- 
draw their faith and obedience." How like 



' ' ' »The 

aIihIi .1 | 

is held I h bishop without di 

the whole," and •• unil ,„ the 

...thechai 
"' St Augusrin, • 
nirious, or insane, i ,„• , 

• k ,, -»> prepari -land. 

when would be no loi \ : . elm 

' un 

kithful | Ni ne hundred 

thr la,ull! tin in England, wh 

ty-eightsu Archbishoj 

bury ha 

llm '' 'I 1 '- after the Council 

"' lU) ^" .! both 

Eastand West, and in ,i in particular, 

had mostsolemnly d ;\ , lU . 

thorityof the Roman Pontiff, a kin ned 

in England as violent and despotic as tl 
Williams and Edwards and Henries who had 
reigned before him. After havii d 



The /' 261 

the ler of the Faith from the 

for having written against the effusions 
of Martin Luther, he suddenly discovered 
n<\\ lights I ' in the eyes of a waiting- 

woman of hi n. He discovered, first, 

that he had been living for twenty years in a 
>f adultery with a very virtuous woman ; 
1 when the Pope, not having the same 
ild not hear of his being separated 
•11 her on account of this remorse of con- 

1 tndly, that he him- 
If had been appointed by Christ head of 
uirch, at least that portion of it com- 
pri tween the North Sea, St. George's 

annel, the Straits of I >over, and the Tweed. 
Mis daughter by his first wife, not having 
■n illuminated in the same manner, re- 
turned to the spiritual obedience of the Ro- 
man See. But his daughter by his second 
wife, while the first was still living, completed 
r lather's work, by declaring the Protestant 
religion the religion of England, and herself 
it- head. The bishops of England, more 



77/, /' 
co »U3 than under I !< nrv. all except I 

Iminister to her the 
nation . all ■ . t |, ( . 

' anterbt vacant by the death 

" , ' inth bishop « 

• 
to Dean Nicholas \\ 

it historian Heylin, •• desi 
'"• -till a well Wish 

v ' ' by her 

me i nd authority 

u ' Pari o had been chaplain l 

mol 

bury, and a new chur i n 

1 "I- but not tfa land's A, 

Then the Catholic Church entered upon 
iN Passion; it was crucified; its enemi 
thought that it was killed: ii inly * 

buried and hid Was it to i j n 

tlK '- v, ' ar " Ad of Catholic Emand. 

Pation was passed. The Roman I 

in England then wore a handful. pri. n- 



The P 263 

try. and common people. Since that time, 
they have erected [,000 churches, 2,000 
en ordained, 300 convents and 
tteries buill : the cities of London, Liv- 
>1, and Manchester, swarm with Catho- 
I sinew, in great measure, it is 
true, from that Ap Isle which did so 

much for the early conversion of England 
ristianity ; but whatever is best, what- 
■ noble, most educated, most high, 
most 1 >l true, most pure, is coming 

rapidly back to the ancient faith; and, what 
the most striking sign of all, nowhere 
more than in that ecclesiastical province 
which Iges as its head the present 

Archbishop of Westminster, docs there exist 
among Catholics devoted loyalty and love 
for the successor of St. Peter in the Apos- 
the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the Pope 
Rome, as the centre of unity in the Chris- 
church, the fountain of true doctrine, 
source of all spiritual authority, and the 
Beat of perpetual infallibility. 



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